The government has been warned not to worsen off-rolling by placing leaders “under unnecessary pressure to demonstrate rapid improvement” as RISE teams prepare to step into schools with “concerning” attainment.
Analysis suggests hundreds of schools could be in line for the targeted help, with most among the most deprived in England.
But leaders fear the new attainment push could leave them “swamped” with conflicting advice, while others believe the changes could extend children’s time in underperforming classrooms.
Off-rolling concerns
Until now, targeted support from the government’s RISE improvement teams has only been given to “stuck” schools, those rated ‘requires improvement’ following an earlier below-good inspection grade.
In documents published this week, the DfE said Ofsted “should remain the principal trigger”, but confirmed that this term it will begin “informal engagement with some schools that have low or concerning attainment”.
Sam Henson, the deputy chief executive of the National Governance Association, said: “The government has acknowledged that off-rolling is unacceptable.
“Yet time will tell if the changes resulting from both the accountability review and Ofsted’s new framework will go far enough to ensure that schools are not placed under unnecessary pressure to demonstrate rapid improvement by resorting to excluding vulnerable pupils.”
Plans just ‘weighing the pig’
Under the new plans, RISE teams will meet with low-attaining schools to “discuss their attainment trends and agree actions, including how they will work with hubs, higher performing schools and other sources of well-evidenced support, such as regional networks”.
Describing this as a “first step”, it added ministers will also consult this autumn on further options to use the improvement teams to address low attainment.
But Jeremy Spencer, the chief executive of the Cheshire-based Halliard Trust, said “leaders may be swamped with conflicting advice [or] areas for improvement” if RISE focuses on attainment while Ofsted, under its new framework, homes in on ‘achievement’.
“Whose advice [or] requirements will take precedence?” he asked.
Sir David Carter, the former national schools commissioner, said the plans “fall almost entirely into the weighing the pig category of actions”.
Noting the “best school improvers” work in MATs, he said: “Every day a child is left to learn in a school underperforming is a day too many.
“Time should be spent speeding up the process for joining a trust so that children get a chance to have a better deal.”
277 schools could be in scope
Leora Cruddas, the chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, said the policy attempted “to strike a balance between adding a lighter touch approach to intervention while ensuring schools that aren’t improving are not left that way indefinitely”.
But, despite calling it a “reasonable starting point”, she stressed it would be “important that it is closely monitored and evaluated against the impact on quality of education”.
To understand how many schools could fall within scope, FFT Datalab examined the number of schools with Progress 8 scores of less than -0.5 in each of the past three years. In all, 277 fell below the threshold.
Of these, 163 (59 per cent) were among the 20 per cent most disadvantaged in the country.
Seventy (25 per cent) are in the north west, with 55 (20 per cent) in the south east. The fewest schools were in London (11).
Similar examples aren’t available for primary schools as key stage 2 progress measures have not been available since 2023 because of covid.
‘Another string in the DfE’s bow’
Hugh Greenway, the chief executive of the Elliot Foundation Academies Trust, warned the criteria government will use to decide which schools receive attainment support will be “the single most important thing”.
Some of those at the top of performance tables “aren’t always there through merit”, while “not all” of those at the bottom “are there through demerit – some are just unlucky or dealing with significant additional challenge”.
The government has also set out its new approach to school intervention (see box out). Officials said this, alongside the RISE support, means there will be “twice as many mandatory interventions on average than in the two years before the policy change”.
RISE teams alone are expected to increase their number of interventions from 218 stuck schools to 377 this term, the DfE said this week.
Loic Menzies, an associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said RISE teams were “another string in the DfE’s bow when conversion isn’t needed”.
But he said “more strong trusts are urgently needed if these interventions are to be backed up by the possibility of rebrokering”.
“The DfE needs to avoid putting too many eggs in this basket until RISE teams’ work has been carefully evaluated.”
How to capture context?
The government also faces a difficult decision over the metric it sets for the new low-attaining intervention.
The consultation states it wants to “identify a metric that contextualises performance using prior attainment, while noting that there will be no secondary progress data in 2025-26”.
This is because key stage 2 attainment data from 2019-20 and 2020-21 is not available to calculate Progress 8 scores.
Dave Thomson, the chief statistician at FFT Datalab, said this left the department with “two options, neither of which is ideal”.
“The first is to use key stage 1 data, although this will be missing for pupils who entered the state system since then.
“Alternatively, they could use the average level of [key stage 2] attainment for the previous cohort as a proxy, although … [this] can change from year to year.”
Some schools have already told the government “a multi-year data sample could offer a more stable and accurate picture, helping to avoid misinterpretation due to short-term fluctuations”.
Research conducted by academic John Jerrim and Loic Menzies in 2021 found such multi-year averages would be “technically feasible … and [have] the potential to mitigate several longstanding shortcomings of England’s accountability system”.
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