Marvell College in Hull has climbed over 1200 places in the Fairer School Index.
With many school league tables simply looking at exam results, the Fairer School Index seeks to rank schools whilst taking a variety of other factors into account, including demographics, deprivation, and students’ first language, to paint a ‘fairer’ picture of a school’s success level.
Academic, George Leckie from the University of Bristol, who developed the Fairer Schools Index, says this removes some of the built-in bias against secondarY schools teaching children from deprived areas in the Department for Education’s league tables.
For many years the Government’s method of evaluating secondary school performance, known as the Progress 8 measure, has failed to take into account factors including the number of children from poorer backgrounds at each school.
The Fairer Schools Index has been highlighted by the campaign group Northern Powerhouse Partnership as it calls for a better way of evaluating schools in different areas of the country. Across the North of England, there are 233 schools out of 928 in the region which move up at least one band to ‘average’ or better as a result of applying the fairer measurements.
Henri Murison, Chief Executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, said: “The Fairer Schools Index exposes the shortcomings of Progress 8 being used to measure any school’s performance on its own.
“By failing to account for a number of different variables related to pupils’ backgrounds, the last Government labelled many schools in areas like the North East of England as under-performing while failing to account for demographic differences in helping drive higher outcomes in London schools.
“We are advocating for the adoption of a value-added measure side by side with the current, unadjusted data. This will allow us to recognise better those schools that do the most for those children from backgrounds too often let down in modern Britain.”
The results, revealed exclusively by the Mirror, show the schools where teachers are beating the odds to make the greatest positive impact on pupils up to the age of 16.
The third highest climber in Yorkshire and the Humber is The Marvell College on Barham Road, Hull, which rose by 1214 places to sit in 854th place nationally. In Yorkshire and the Humber, only Oasis Academy Wintringham in North East Lincolnshire and Outwood Academy Carlton in Barnsley climbed more ranks than The Marvell College, going up by 1256, and 1235 places respectively.
The school has told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “The Marvell College and its staff are proud to work on behalf of, and to represent, everyone in their community and are very pleased that research is being conducted that recognises not just the hard work we, and many other schools in our local area, do to support young people, but also the inequalities within the current accountability systems. At The Marvell College we pride ourselves on our inclusive approach to education and on the high-quality support pupils receive here helping them to be “as good as anyone, anywhere”.
The five highest ranking schools from Yorkshire and the Humber are:
- Mercia School, Sheffield (3)
- Wingfield Academy, Rotherham (27)
- The Ruth Gorse Academy, Leeds (41)
- Trinity Academy Cathedral, Wakefield (43)
- De Warenne Academy, Doncaster (46)
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