DfE fails to refute LSN analysis: DfE data shows academies do not perform better

Article by Henry Stewart on Local Schools Network (04 March 2012)

"This week the Department for Education issued an attempted rebuttal of our data comparing results from academies and other state schools, as highlighted in last week’s Observer. It is an odd and rather shallow response. The critique bears so little relation to either the Observer article or the extensive analysis on this site that I wonder if the author actually read them.

DfE: “Much of their analysis was based on a simplistic comparison between all schools and Academies – nearly all of which were previously failing local authority maintained schools. As Academies are having to recover from such a low base such a comparison is nonsensical.”

Not true. In fact the Observer article compares academies and non-academies starting from a similar low base. For schools achieving less than 35% in 2008 (in % of students getting 5 GCSE A-Cs including English & Maths), academies increased 18% (from 24% to 42%) and non-academies by 19%, from 24% to 43%. These figures are given in the Observer article. It is hard to understand how the DfE author missed them."

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