Issue - meetings

Consideration was given to the report of the Corporate Director of Education which was presented to provide Members of the Scrutiny Committee with an opportunity to scrutinise the findings of ongoing self-evaluation and business planning processes undertaken within the Education Directorate, across the Council and with key partners.

The Corporate Director of Education advised Members that this was a new report but some of the data would relate back to 2019-2020 as there had been a relaxation of the performance and data management arrangements, however, this was an updated report on the current position from a self-evaluation perspective. 

The Corporate Director of Education spoke to the report and highlighted areas where good progress had been made and where further improvement was required.

A Member referred to scrutinising 2019 data and enquired regarding the reason for this, as he felt that this data had already been scrutinised in a previous report.  The Corporate Director of Education reiterated there had been a relaxation in reporting arrangements. A report had been presented to Scrutiny on the Key Stage 4 results, in particular within secondary schools, however, they were based on Centre Assessment Grades (CAGs).  He pointed out that it was not possible to undertake stringent benchmarking linked to the fact that they were not externally verified results.

The Member raised concerns regarding the different methods of assessments and felt it was important that schools did not fall into a false sense of security moving forward.

The Corporate Director of Education said that the results achieved at Key Stage 4 were in line with targets set in the School Development Plans.  Future reports could include a connection between performance at Key Stage 4 against the School Development Plan, but the Council had to be cautious against holding schools to account against that data at this juncture.

A Member referred to paragraph 6.2 – Schools Causing Concern (SCC) and felt that the improvement work that these schools had undertaken over the last two years had not been recognised as Estyn had not been undertaking normal monitoring activity for some time.  The Corporate Director of Education said that both schools had raised this issue as Estyn monitoring visits had been put on hold, which meant that both schools continued to be in an Estyn category for a period of time. Schools Causing Concern meetings had been held and had highlighted that satisfactory progress had been made.  A meeting with Estyn had been planned and they had strongly indicated, dependent on any potential increases related to Covid, that monitoring visits would recommence in the autumn term, which would provide both schools with the opportunity to have their progress assessed by the Inspectorate.

A Member enquired regarding the areas for improvement, in particular, poor language acquisition skills in very young children and suggested a possible solution would be to increase pre-school and nursery provision across the borough.  He also enquired regarding the key area for improvement on school exclusions and commented that if school exclusions continued to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6