§ Mr. JenkinsTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what criteria are used to assess the gap between the best and worst performing(a) secondary and (b) primary schools; whether this gap is widening or narrowing; and at what rate. [106506]
§ Mr. MilibandThe Department uses a range of Key Stage and GCSE/GNVQ performance measures to report publicly on the attainment of pupils in their schools. Achievement information for individual schools is published in Performance Tables, and the Department's autumn package of pupil performance contains several school level attainment distributions for groups of schools categorised by different proportions of pupils 'known to be eligible for free school meals', and by different levels of aggregate pupil prior attainment.
The following tables show two changes in the national distributions of school performances:
(a) Percentage of pupils achieving 5 + A*-C at GCSE/ GNVQ.
Year Percentile 1997 2002 Percentage point Change 95th 89 93 4 Upper quartile 55 62 7 60th 46 53 7 Median 41 48 7 40th 36 43 7 Lower quartile 27 34 7 5th 14 18 4 (b) Percentage of pupils achieving Level 4 + at Key Stage 2 English.
Source:
DfES Autumn Package
Year Percentile 1997 2002 Percentage Point Change 95th 93 97 4 Upper quartile 78 87 9 60th 71 82 11 Median 67 78 11 40th 61 73 12 Lower quartile 52 66 14 5th 32 46 14 Source:
DfES Autumn Package
These show that since 1997 the range of performance at Key Stage 2 has decreased with the performance of schools in the lowest quartile increasing faster than the national average. Improvement in school performance for the GCSE/GNVQ measure has been broadly the same across the attainment distribution.