School groups - including multi-academy trusts - should be judged on how inclusive they are as well as the results they produce, according to a new report.

The paper by the Education Policy Institute, published today, warns that only measuring pupils’ progress and attainment can lead to groups of schools excluding or off-rolling pupils or not admitting vulnerable children.

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The report suggests creating a new set of inclusive performance measures based on school choice, attendance and exclusions and pupil achievement to address this.

This could include measuring the gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers and the level of exclusions and unexplained exits from school groups.

Schools ‘should be measured on inclusion’

The EPI said this would serve as a means for school groups to benchmark their progress against others and identify ways of becoming more inclusive.

The think tank is consulting on plans now and will produce a final report in September.

The research is being supported by the NEU teaching union.

Bobbie Mills, the report’s author and a senior researcher at the EPI, said the recommendations were needed as the government was looking to push the expansion of multi-academy trusts.

But the EPI report on school groups also refers to school federations, local dioceses and local authorities as groups of schools.

Ms Mills said: “There are serious limitations to measuring the effectiveness of these groups solely on pupil progress and attainment.

“An effective school group must meet the needs of all pupils in the communities it serves, which is why our paper proposes a new measurement of school effectiveness that also considers pupil inclusion.”

Suggested performance measures

The new paper suggests school attainment measures that could assess how inclusive a schools group is could include the disadvantage attainment gap at both key stage 2 and at GCSE.

School groups could be measured on the percentage of students achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths - and the percentage of students achieving grade 4 in English and maths GCSE - both for all students and disadvantaged students. 

The measures could also take into account the destinations of disadvantaged students completing 16-18 study.

The EPI suggests that a group of schools could be measured on the likelihood of a pupil on free school meals applying for a place compared with non-FSM pupils. It suggests this could be broken down by ethnicity and also for pupils with an education, health and care plan (EHCP).

It also proposes measuring a school group’s rate of persistent absence, rate of repeated fixed-term exclusions, rate of permanent exclusions due to persistent disruptive behaviour and average termly rate of unexplained exits by pupils.

Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, said: “It’s time to think differently about which metrics are used to evaluate schools and to develop their capacity for self-evaluation.

“We know how essential collaboration between schools is to success for greater numbers of students across the system. We think this project can explore interesting questions about what gets measured and why, and the consequences of these policy choices, especially for some groups of young people.” 

Mr Courtney said that the differences in the level of disruption caused by Covid in schools creates a question about what response is needed from the sector this year and next.

He added: “Inclusion and wellbeing should be a central goal of education, so we need to develop better ways to make that a reality for students and their communities.”

Reacting to the EPI report, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “The EPI is quite right to highlight that measuring multi-academy trusts and other school groups on pupil progress and attainment alone could create problems that can lead, in some circumstances, to serious consequences for vulnerable students.

“The idea of introducing performance measures that recognise the good work that most schools do in prioritising inclusion and supporting vulnerable children is well observed and something we have already identified as beneficial. 

“ASCL’s Blueprint for a Fairer Education System, published in September last year, proposes the idea of a ‘data dashboard’ of performance measures which goes beyond academic results, precisely because of the critical work that schools do in other ways, such as inclusion.”

However, Mr Barton added that any such performance measures would need to be carefully considered to avoid the sector feeling like it was “another stick with which to beat schools”.