The Department for Education may have breached its own workload protocols by announcing planned changes to school performance tables with less than a full academic year’s notice, headteachers’ leaders have warned.
Yesterday, the DfE said that it planned to make changes to the English Baccalaureate performance measure to “incentivise” schools to enter pupils for the full suite of subjects.
The DfE said it would consult with the sector on moving to a “headline EBacc attainment measure”, which it plans to introduce for the 2024-25 academic year.
In response to this, the Association of School and College Leaders has raised concern that this move may have breached a government commitment it made on the timing of announcing changes to the school accountability system.
Tom Middlehurst, ASCL’s qualifications specialist, said the union had questioned “whether this announcement breaks the DfE’s own workload protocols in giving schools a full academic year before major changes to accountability are introduced”.
The DfE protocol says that “there should be a lead in time of at least a year for any accountability, curriculum or qualifications initiative coming from the department [that] requires schools to make significant changes which will have an impact on staff workload”.
Mr Middlehurst said: “We also have concerns that this is being applied retrospectively to the current Year 10 cohort, who have already started their GCSEs and made options months ago.
“This will feel to schools that they are being held accountable against a metric they weren’t aware of when planning their KS4 offer.”
In updated guidance published yesterday, the DfE said it wants to move to a “headline EBacc attainment measure that incentivises full EBacc entry”.
It says it plans to consult this autumn on changes that would be applied for the 2024-25 academic year.
Government short of achieving EBacc target
The move comes as the government remains well short of achieving the targets it set for EBacc take-up.
The EBacc was created as a performance measure to incentivise schools to get more students to study a suite of academic subjects at GCSE.
To be classed as studying for the EBacc, a pupil must take English language and literature, maths, the sciences, geography or history and a language at GCSE.
The government set targets for 75 per cent of students to be studying the subject combination at GCSE by 2022 and for 90 per cent to be doing so by 2025. However, figures for 2021 show that less than 40 per cent of pupils were doing the full suite of subjects needed.
Mr Middlehurst said: “It isn’t yet clear what changes the DfE is proposing over the EBacc APS measure and we are talking to officials about the options and implications. We are concerned about the direction of travel. Progress 8 is not perfect by any means but it was introduced to prioritise a focus on pupil progress over time rather than simply on attainment.
“This was widely felt to be a fairer way of measuring performance. What we don’t want to see is a drift back towards a focus on attainment in an attempt to leverage higher uptake of EBacc.
“There is already an EBacc entry headline measure, so changing the methodology of the attainment measure is likely to tell us the same thing, but in a less nuanced way.”
He added that the biggest problem with EBacc is that uptake “will always be constrained by the fact that there are not enough modern foreign language teachers”.
The DfE has been approached for a comment.
