Report cards: Labour’s proposed reform will require caution

The success of Labour’s proposed accountability reform, the school report card will depend on who and what it is for as well as what it covers and how information is assured.

Labour’s desire for parents to be “partners in the push for better” implies a dual aim of parental engagement and school improvement. The ambition is right, but – as I discovered when we considered report cards in the 2019 NAHT-led School Improvement Commission – the result could quickly become unwieldy.

We envisaged a report card with no overall grade that would cover a range of national progress, outcomes and destinations data as well as school-generated figures and narrative on things that matter but can’t easily be measured.

For parents, we envisaged information on the ethos of the school, curriculum, approach to behaviour and instruction. This would help them decide if the school’s values and ambitions aligned with theirs, and could include survey data from pupils, parents and staff. Asking schools to distil their essence into a consistent format could make it easier for parents to compare than wading through websites and prospectuses.

To support school and system improvement, other information would be important too. Setting out each school’s main areas of strength alongside what they are working to address and enhance would serve as a reminder to all that the job of school improvement is never done, helping drive upwards convergence across the system.

Publishing schools’ top 2 or 3 fortes and development areas would make it easier for them to identify and connect with each other for expertise and support. At Challenge Partners, we use peer review to systematically identify and accredit excellence, which schools can search in an online directory. Imagine the power of recording the expertise of every school in the country, not just the 560 in our partnership.

One of the challenges with the current inspection system is the long gap between visits, which could lengthen if resources are redirected to annual safeguarding checks. If parents do engage with reports – which Public First research recently cast doubt on – they are often too out-of-date to tell them much about what the school is like now. Report cards could be updated annually with public data and additional information added by schools.

The cards could be strengthened through external scrutiny of qualitative elements. Inspections would provide formal validation – perhaps every three years – and peer challenge could add rigour to schools’ self-evaluation each year in between.

A word of caution though: the power of peer review relies on schools feeling able to share what they’re finding hard, as well as what they are doing well. The fact that Challenge Partners’ Quality Assurance Reviews are confidential and developmental ensures schools can be open and get the insight they need to improve. Use of peer scrutiny for report cards shouldn’t disrupt this principle.

So how do we get there from here? The first task is the wide engagement Labour proposes to settle on who and what report cards are for. The result must be a report card, not a compendium. Simplicity – but not the bluntness of a single grade – is key.

The inspection system would then need to align with the card, balancing a universal framework with an ability to validate – or not – the claims a school makes about itself. This would require skilled inspectors able to exercise sound professional judgement more consistently than now, but the impact of inevitable variation between inspectors would be diminished if the outcome were more sophisticated than the current single judgement.

Decisions and legislation would then be needed to define the basis for DfE intervention in schools, because a rounded view of school performance should not be a mask for poor performance.

Getting it right would take time and the discipline to resist pressure to include too many measures. The delay would be worthwhile if the result is accepted by parents and schools as a useful tool, and the time is also used to build expertise and capacity for successful implementation.

The most transformational thing Labour could deliver in office is a tool that drives continuous improvement, so that every school is excellent and parents have the right information to choose between them.