Sir – All three major parties have been keen to attract our support with ideas about further reform of schools and learning. Whatever the result of the national election, what seems clear locally is that change is, indeed, required.
Since their election in 2004 the local Conservative administration has favoured ‘real choice’ in its attempts to improve local services; yet our schools continue to lag our statistical neighbours (SNs), ranking eighth of 11 across a basket of GCSE and A-Level measures this year, in line with past performance.
In the delivery of ‘real choice’ our secondary schools’ admissions procedure leaves us last of those SNs which have no overt selection in the process: we rank ninth of the 11 on the percentage of children obtaining a place at their preferred school, but the tenth and 11th positions are held by authorities which still have grammars.
In recently published data from Ofsted, measuring the percentage of secondary schools whose latest inspection report graded them ‘Outstanding’ or ‘Good’, we rank tenth amongst our 11 SNs.
We need to be wary of reading too much in to any individual result on any particular measure.
But if we see poor relative performance, across multiple measures, year after year, then we can be confident in asserting that our schools aren’t as good as they ought to be. We fail to deploy the contested tool of choice, ‘choice’, effectively; and Ofsted confirms that other authorities have better schools than ours.
Neither councillor Waine nor our Secondary School Heads’ Association seem able to offer a strategy to remedy our relatively poor performance.
Our new Director for Children, Young People and Families may yet have something compelling to offer . . .
We have no further need of bland reassurance. Rather, change, and for the better, please.
Peter Martin, Bampton
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