HC Deb 08 December 2003 vol 415 c299W
Mr. Jenkins

To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what plans he has to introduce value added data into secondary school performance tables for England which take account of external influences on performance, with particular reference to pupils' economic, social and cultural backgrounds. [141809]

Mr. Miliband

The publication in performance tables last year of value added measures based on the prior attainment of each pupil—by far the most important factor in explaining pupil performance—was a ground breaking step forward. It is largely thanks to that publication that value added is now generally understood by the wider educational establishment and is becoming familiar to parents. Now that those foundations have been laid, we can begin to explore more sophisticated systems of adding context to the national test and examination results by exploiting the wealth of pupil level data that are becoming available. Other contextual factors account for only a small further element, and taking them into account would make our approach to value added far more complicated. We therefore need to balance all of these considerations before deciding on the way forward for performance tables. In the meantime, we provide LEAs and schools with a wealth of benchmarking material which allows them to assess their performance and that of their pupils using tools such as the Pupil Achievement Tracker.