Lauch of National Challenge

In March I posted on the initial ideas behind the National Challenge: an attempt to ensure that no secondary school is below 30% of it's pupils achieving 5 good GCSEs (including English and Maths) by 2011. It takes the London Challenge national (across England).

Now the full details are out, which I summarise below, before offering links to online sources.

Key points:
- The aim is to ensure that all secondary schools have at least 30% of their pupils achieving at least 5 good GCSEs by 2011 (including English & maths). This figure is part of a wider move to have 90% of 19 year old's achieving this standard by 2020 as part of the Leitch skills agenda

- Each local authority will have to draft plans of how they will deal with schools who are within the national challenge or at risk of falling to below the 30% target. Plans to be presented to DSCF by end of July

- Yorkshire and Humber has the highest percentage of schools which fall into this category than any other region (27%). Click for a full list of schools in England. Below is a diagramme from the DCSF for Yorkshire and Humber.

- Whilst many of these schools have a high incidence of free school meals (a proxy for family poverty) and a low attainment at primary level English & Maths, many schools with similar characteristics do well and can be well above the 30% target

- The City of York is held as a beacon local authority due to the way it has approached similar issues in their schools (they also have no schools in the category)
- There is £400m given to this challenge. £20m will be spent on national challenge advisors, who will replace existing school improvement partners and can offer increased support (up to 20 days per year); £20m on National Leaders of Education and other Leadership support; £100m on teaching and learning and other support; £260 on building academy and trust schools where the school is falling substantially below the target
- Extra support for English and Maths tuition
- Sir Mike Tomlinson will chair an expert group to assist national challenge schools

BBC News website

Read DCSF News release

Complete list of number of schools per local authority

Click on image to see Schools Minister, Jim Knight, explain the policy

National Challenge

The Prime Minister & Schools Secretary have promised that all schools will be achieving at least 30% of students gaining 5 or more A*-C grades at GCSE including English and Maths by 2012. To ensure this happens they will launch the "National Challenge" in May and all Local Authorities will be expected to have an action plan for each school by the summer.

Nationally there are 638 schools which would fail to meet this threshold, 81 of which (approximately) are in Yorkshire & Humber region and in all but one of the 15 Local Authorities (City of York being the exception).

Part of the solution the growth of academy schools, which is being accelerated to 55 a year.

In 2007 Yorkshire Futures released a report investigating why the Yorkshire and Humber region has consistently poor GCSE result. Read summary here.

Growth of specialist schools

At the end of Januaty 2008, the DCFS announced 89 new specialist schools. This takes the total of specialist schools up to 88% of the maintained secondary school sector. There are 26 Local Authority's which are 100% specialist: in the Yorkshire and Humber Region there is only one local authority which is 100% specialist - York.