Minutes:
“Sadly Medway primary schools are once again bottom of the league. Parents and teachers feel let down by this Conservative administration by the lack of support it has shown to schools.
Why should we trust this administration in addressing poor performance given the lack of urgency they have shown to try to improve primary schools in Medway?”
Councillor Tolhurst stated that she believed that Mr Murray had confused the Her Majesty’s Chief Inspectorate (HMCI) Annual Report with the pupil performance league tables. The HMCI Annual Report ranked authorities by the proportion of pupils in good or outstanding schools and not how those pupils had performed.
She stated that this was not to say that it was not an important report and the Council took it very seriously. However, it should not be allowed to undermine the important work that the Education Team had been doing. Pupil performance had gone up 4% to the highest ever result of 75%, which was 5% higher than the bottom.
As far as the number of schools which were good or outstanding, it was important to remember that many of the schools had not been re-inspected, some for over five years, and therefore this was a snapshot of existing judgements.
She stated that the School Improvement Strategy had been approved on 13 January 2015 by Cabinet after extensive consultation with schools; head teachers, governors and partners.
Since October 2014, four more schools had been inspected with three schools being graded as “good”. She referred to the other school and stated that she had already flagged it up as needing improvement and had put in an Interim Executive Board to oversee radical improvement. She referred to the relevant Ofsted report, where the lead inspector wrote: “The local authority has been instrumental in organising the change in governance, which has clearly benefited the school.”
She stated that the Administration’s work had been directly praised by Ofsted here, and some of the plans by Labour to reform the Council’s management structure directly contradicted Ofsted’s advised practice.
Mr Murray stated that he had recently left Medway where he had been teaching as a Deputy Head and having seen the performances year on year going down under this Administration, he asked what Councillor Tolhurst would say to someone like him who saw no incentive to be working in Medway as a teacher.
Councillor Tolhurst stated that Medway was a great place to live and work and she hoped that anyone would feel that Medway was a good place to come and live and work.
She stated that education was a priority for this Administration and this was clearly shown by her appointment over just one academic year ago and since then more support had been implemented. There had been robust challenge of Medway’s schools and also improvements had been seen around key stage 1 and 2 and secondary results. She stated that the Council wanted to achieve better results and Ofsted judgements and that was what this new School Improvement Strategy would achieve through the setting out of clear priorities for the accelerated progress and with clear targets.