§ Mr. DrewTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what steps he is taking to address difficulties in assessing value added improvements in secondary schools where part of their intake have not previously been evaluated in terms of SATS and teacher assessment. [146560]
§ Mr. MilibandValue added measures for schools can only be calculated using existing data. Given that all pupils of compulsory school age attending maintained mainstream schools follow the National Curriculum, there are only a very small number who were not assessed at the end of the earlier key stage—for example, only 3 per cent. of 15-year-olds had no prior attainment data at Key Stage 3 in the 2003 performance tables.
Though most schools will be unaffected, we accept that a small number might have a significant proportion of pupils with no prior attainment data—for example, pupils from overseas. This is why we publish a coverage indicator in the performance tables which shows the percentage of pupils on which the value added calculation is based.