Is Kingston Council as good at Education as it thinks it is?

One of the hardest things about being on education committees in Kingston upon Thames is having to put up with the constant mantra that they are outstanding and Ofsted agrees with them, when my own experience is that they generally do not have much of a clue. Some of my reasons for this are given in my previous posts on education. But now the truth may be coming out!

One of the (many, many) things that I do not like about our education department is the grief they give us over our lowly league table position when the reasons for our apparent poor performance are the low levels of prior achievement for many of our children and the insufficient funding we get from the council to meet this need (see previous postings on the funding of schools for the proof of this). One of our counter-arguments is that our Contextual Value Add (CVA) is above 100 (by definition the average performance improvement for all children across all schools in the country), so we must be doing something right.

Now the secondary results published this week show that Kingston upon Thames has a CVA of 998.9 against the national average of 1000. Put simply, equivalent children make less progress in Kingston's secondary schools than the national average. Kingston is less than average.

It will be interesting to see how they try to maintain the "we are outstanding" stance after that. Sadly, I think that they will try and they will still convince most people. At least I'll continue to have the satisfaction of knowing that I am right.