There was a way to handle this, Mr Balls, but political grandstanding wasn’t it...

Last updated 11:29, Tuesday, 22 July 2008

There are 638 schools across the country that have to improve or close.

Mission men: Left, John McAuley, headteacher of Newman Catholic School, Carlisle. Above, Peter McGaw head of Cumbria’s school improvement team

These are the schools where fewer than 30 per cent of pupils get five GCSEs at grade C or above including English and maths.

I was visiting a school in the north east the day after the National Challenge announcement.

The head was angry and concerned. That morning 10 parents had telephoned to say they were moving their children to another school, governors had called to ask why they hadn’t been told the school was failing and pupils had asked when the school was going to close.

Over the last few years this school has had a rising trend of passes at GCSE, attendance at school has risen sharply, exclusions have gone down. The last Ofsted report said the school was good and improving.

But it’s in a very deprived area where parents’ support for education and school work isn’t high on their agenda. Very few of them had a good experience of school themselves, even fewer stayed on at school or went to college. The homes aren’t full of books and, if you can’t do your homework, mum and dad are unlikely to be able to help.

So a lot of the pupils start from a low base in terms of language and numbers.

They make good progress in primary schools but their skills aren’t reinforced at home or on the streets.

In this particular secondary school progress in English and maths from 11 years old to 16 is excellent, but Mr Balls, the Secretary of State, isn’t talking about progress, just raw results compared with a national average.

We have much more sophisticated ways of comparing school performance now. A national pupil database enables us to compare similar pupils in similar schools.

It is called the “contextual value added” (CVA) measure and takes into account prior attainment (where a child starts from) and other factors that affect a child’s performance at school.

My school in the north east has a “significantly positive” CVA.

These children make good progress and there is a rising trend but it hasn’t quite hit the magic 30 per cent with English and maths.

So the headlines in the local paper, encouraged by Mr Balls’ press release, threaten it with closure.

I guess that when the dust settles the head will gratefully use all the extra support the school will get to raise achievement in English and maths even further.

He will add to the booster classes the school already runs and the one-to-one and small group coaching sessions to help pupils who are struggling. All this is very good and much needed.

My issue is not the extra support but the way it was handled; the blunt “improve or close” message taking away confidence in local schools and giving no credit for the excellent progress already being made in some.

There are schools that need to change, but there are more reliable and fair measures to identify underperformance.

We need to improve achievement in schools, particularly in English and maths, but we don’t need headline grabbing political announcements made to prove the Government is actually doing something and to distract us from other more problematic national issues.