The researchers want to find a method which would take account of factors such as pupils’ health, happiness and general wellbeing. 

If adopted, the new performance measure being developed in Britain would help officials to check if schools were looking after the all-round welfare of pupils, as recommended by the Every Child Matters initiative. It would also acknowledge the growing collaboration between schools in Britain, and variation within schools.

“We are still assessing schools around educational outcomes. This narrow focus is not going to encourage school leaders to deal with the other issues expected in the Every Child Matters agenda and could act as a barrier to progress,” said Chris Chapman, from Manchester University’s school of education.

Efforts have been made in the past to improve the way schools are held accountable. Valued-added scores were added to league tables in 2002 to take account of pupils’ prior attainment. Then contextual value-added (CVA) scores were developed to reflect wider factors such as deprivation levels, pupil ethnicity, gender and parents’ occupation.

“But it [CVA] is still based around exam results,” Dr Chapman said.

His team hopes to develop a measure that will allow parents to compare how well schools did with pupils from specific ethnic, social or academic groups. Dr Chapman also wants the measure to take account of what students think. 

The head of Blackrod Church School in Bolton, James Royal, agrees that students should have greater involvement.

“Children need to be involved as much as is humanly possible, alongside professional judgements from adults, because without their input it is difficult to get it right,” he said.

The researchers at Manchester University believe that, with growing collaboration between schools, individual schools are much less suitable as the unit used to assess the performance of an education system.

More schools were sharing staff and pupils, Dr Chapman said. He warned that unless the accountability system changed to reflect this, enthusiasm for successful joint working could be dampened. (Source: TES)