Improving the educational attainment of our children and young people
School performance
Nearly nine out of every 10 children in Coventry attend a school that is rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, the schools’ inspectorate. In March 2024, 85.8% of secondary-aged pupils attended a good or outstanding school which is the same as March 2023. The figure for primary-aged pupils has improved to 91.1% and for pupils attending a special school has improved significantly to 91.7%. We remain aware that every inspection provides a grade at a particular point in time and all schools have made significant efforts regarding school improvement progress since their last inspections. Each overall inspection outcome also comprises of a range of sub-judgements – even where schools are below an overall Good grade, key strengths are identified in inspections. For example, many of these schools received Good judgements for “Leadership & Management” and “Behaviour & Attitudes” at their most recent inspections.
Pupil attainment
In January 2021 the Government announced that in response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, that it was not appropriate for many exams and assessments to proceed as planned. It was confirmed that students taking GCSE, AS and A levels regulated by Ofqual would be awarded grades based on teacher assessment. Teachers were required to use a range of evidence to make a judgement about the grade at which their students performed, with a focus on the curriculum content that students had been taught.
Every school and college were required to put into place an internal quality assurance process, which was defined in their centre policy. The exam centres’ internal quality assurance included the standardisation of marking and grading judgements. As part of the external quality assurance, exam boards reviewed the centre policies for all centres, requested evidence from all centres and checked the evidence used to support teacher grades for some students in a sample of centres.
In both 2020 and 2021 grades awarded via teacher and lecturer assessment nationally were significantly higher, overall, than they had been in 2019.
For 2022, Ofqual announced that grading for pupils in England would again make provision for pandemic impact but anticipated that grades were expected to fall to a mid-point between those in 2019 and 2021. From 2023, it was expected that grades would revert to a more normal distribution. As such, 2022 has been described as a transition year.
Key Stage 2
In Summer 2023, 56% of children attained the expected standard in the combined measure reading, writing and maths by the end of Key Stage 2. This is an improvement from 2022, in line with statistical neighbour average, and closed the gap to the national average (60%).
There has also been a focus on improving Careers Education in our schools with the launch of a new Coventry Careers Hub, delivered in partnership with Think Higher (part of the University of Warwick). All Coventry schools and FE colleges are engaged with the Coventry Careers Hub, supporting them to improve their achievement against the 8 Gatsby benchmarks (national measures for assessing the quality of careers activity provided by schools). The Coventry Careers Hub have had a particular focus on ensuring that schools that previously achieved less than 3 of the Gatsby Benchmarks were supported to achieve 3 or more. The Careers Hub have helped to ensure that 100% of schools have moved into this position. Further actions have been taken to support schools to increase the number of Gatsby benchmarks achieved between 4 and 7, and 35% of schools have been supported to achieve all 8 Gatsby benchmarks.
The Local Authority continues to work with schools within the Coventry Education Partnership to identify impactful opportunities for collaboration in school improvement. One such area is the Primary Aspirations Strategy, where a steering group has been established and the first ever Coventry Primary Aspirations Week was delivered in March 2024.
Case study
The first ever Coventry Primary Aspirations Week ran from Monday 4 March to Friday 8 March. Over 500 primary school children took part in the week’s events, with volunteers from businesses and organisations across Coventry visiting schools to talk about job roles, what the organisations do, and to encourage the children to think about their possible careers in the future. The children, aged between 7-11, were given the opportunity to learn about things such coding and how it can be used in job roles, how gaming organisations use project management and about roles that include art and creative skills. Children were given the opportunity to ask questions and talk about their possible future career choices too. Councillor Dr Kindy Sandhu, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills, said: “I am really proud of this initiative and the feedback we’ve had from schools and children has been nothing but positive. We really wanted to give the children an opportunity to think about their futures and imagine the type of careers they might want to purse. We know that children’s aspirations are shaped by their life experiences and the theme for this year was “To be it, you need to see it”, so we wanted to create an event that gave children the chance to broaden their horizons.” The Primary Aspirations week was launched to coincide with National Careers Week, which aims to support young people in their awareness of future career pathways. The aim for Primary Aspirations Week is to encourage primary school-aged children to think about possible career choices in the future, and how to develop some of the skills they might need to get there. Jo Stanley, the headteacher at Little Heath Primary School, which played host one of the events, said: “It was a fabulous opportunity for primary children to hear from external speakers who brought their own experiences and skillset to inspire the children. The morning had an immediate impact on the children to think about their own skills and future aspirations outside of the classroom too.”
Key Stage 4
The Government made changes to Key Stage 4 assessment arrangements in 2020, 2021 and 2022 due to the impact of the pandemic. 2023 saw a return to previous methodology and, as a result, trend comparisons are made back to 2019 which is the most recent comparable data set.
At Key Stage 4 we saw a rising trend in all areas, with the improvement in Coventry data closing the gap with the national position for all attainment measures. Attainment 8 score is the average measure of an individual student's attainment across their 8 best performing subjects taken at GCSE level. The Attainment 8 score of individual students is then used to help calculate each school and the local authorities’ overall Attainment 8 score. In Summer 2023, the Attainment 8 score for schools in Coventry was 43.8. This is an improvement on the equivalent score from 2019 (pre-pandemic) of 43.6 and is above statistical neighbours. In addition the gap with the national average has closed since 2019.
Progress 8 is a 'value-added' measure that indicates how much a secondary school has helped pupils improve (or progress) over a five-year period. In Summer 2022, the Progress 8 score for schools in Coventry was -0.05. This is slightly below the national figure (-0.03) but is an improvement from the equivalent measure in 2019 and also better than the figure for statistical neighbours (-0.14).