A poor aim

The government's education watchdog, Ofsted, is today expected to highlight weaknesses in some areas of teaching of the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools that are undermining the drive to raise attainment levels.

While it examines some of the reasons for the government's failure to hit the crucial key stage 2 targets for this September, the Department for Education and Skills is urgently tackling the problem with a programme of intensive support for the 13 local education authorities with a handful of schools consistently turning out the worst results in the annual national tests.

The government is starting to miss education targets with some regularity, which may be a reflection of the difficulty of that last "push" after making regular year-on-year progress from a relatively low baseline. Last week, for example, it missed a target to reduce infant class sizes by September. And as former education secretary Estelle Morris had promised to resign if the government failed to reach this year's key stage 2 targets - over which she was challenged by the Tories - those targets are likely to have been one of the factors that contributed to her resignation.

But in a keynote speech to new headteachers at a conference in London last week, education secretary Charles Clarke made clear that "targets and testing" are here to stay because of the need for accountability. The government's view, often stressed by school standards minister David Miliband, is that targets help to "stretch" schools.

Although the government's secondary school league tables have been delayed until next year because of the A-level debacle, the primary school tables will be published a week on Thursday. For the first time, critically, a new value-added element will show the crucial difference between schools that achieve good results against the odds in challenging circumstances, and those that are "coasting" and failing to achieve any improvement.

Ofsted's reports on the literacy and numeracy strategies over the last year, published this morning, will reiterate the well-known but nevertheless stark facts that only 75% of 11-year-olds achieved level 4 or above in key stage 2 national curriculum tests for English, below the target of 80%. Some 73% of pupils achieved level 4 or above for mathematics, below the government's target of 75%. Attainment in English overall at the end of key stage 2 has not budged at all since 2000, still fixed at 75%.

Results in writing show a rise of three percentage points since 2001, continuing a steady upward trend since 1999. Ofsted is likely to underline this, yet attainment is still too low and lags further behind achievement in reading, where the picture is not a brilliant one; results have fallen for the second year running. The issue of the respective achievement of boys and girls and the wide gap between the two also remains a major cause for concern, inspectors have concluded. Girls are now a massive nine percentage points ahead of boys at the end of key stage 2, putting them in a much stronger position at the start of secondary school.

Ofsted is likely to be particularly critical of the teaching of reading, claiming there is insufficient use of phonics at this critical early stage in the first years of primary school. In particular the "searchlights" model of reading, for example, which has a "one-size-fits-all" approach, places too much emphasis, at the earliest stages of learning to read, on the use of a broad range of decoding strategies and not enough on phonics. Teachers are also likely to be criticised for their failure to get to grips with shared and guided reading in their primary classes. They are taking a long time to get used to guided reading and there are still aspects of both that are unsatisfactory, Ofsted is likely to say. "Day-to-day assessment was not built into the strategy to enable teachers to adapt their teaching to changes in pupils' progress," is one of its many negative conclusions.

Ofsted's very specific criticisms will be taken fully on board by Professor David Hopkins, who took over this summer as head of the education department's standards and effectiveness unit, which oversees the implementation of the literacy and numeracy strategies. He is under no illusions whatsoever about the scale of the task facing him to raise attainment.

He is confident that this year's targets will be met next year, paving the way for the revised, even more challenging targets that kick in in 2004. That will require that 85% of 11-year-olds achieve level 4 in English and maths by 2004, a target that will remain in place until 2006.

Professor Hopkins is pinning his hopes on the new Primary Intensive Support pilot that started this term. The government has handed out £500,000 to the 13 education authorities that between them have the 113 schools - out of the UK's total of 20,000 - where the key stage 2 results "are resolutely refusing to move". The schools have been identified as among those where fewer than 50% of pupils got level 4 in English or maths or both. Last year a total of 600 schools fell into that category, but the 113 worst have been designated as in need of special help. The government's thinking, Professor Hopkins explains, is that this relatively small number of schools together did so badly that they dragged the overall performance down so that the national target was missed.

The two-year pilot will involve devising "whole school" strategies to increase attainment, Professor Hopkins explains, alongside scrutiny of the school's existing management, leadership and assessment. The key feature of this programme is intensive support from project consultants. The money will be spent on the literacy and numeracy specialists, who will be sent into the school on a regular basis to identify the challenges and then work closely with staff to try and raise attainment. These are schools that need much more than "one last push" to help them boost their attainment levels in order to meet the targets.

But he is confident that this kind of intensive support and help will mean the government will belatedly hit the 2002 target next year, and will be well placed to meet the new targets the following year.

Interestingly, the local education authorities themselves are not necessarily the worst-performing ones. Kent, for example, has pockets of high achievement but these are cancelled out by a handful of schools doing badly.

Professor Hopkins is also very keen to stamp on some of the myths about school achievement and the assumed automatic links with social deprivation. The evidence is that schools with larger proportions of children who qualify for free school meals show a much wider range of performance than schools in other bands. But given that some of these are achieving extremely good results, that provides enormous scope for further gains, he says. "If the bottom half of schools in each free school meals band last year performed as well as the top half of schools, the targets of 85% for 2004 would have been exceeded", he says. "That says something very interesting about the quality of leadership inside those schools." He believes very strongly that a school's "context" - a combination of factors such as its leadership, parental support etc - is crucial to its sustained attainment and improvement. He is also very clear that he backs Ofsted's recent findings that primary schools do better where they offer a wide and balanced curriculum rather than just concentrating on the basics for the tests.

He also points out the need for different strategies to tackle the problems in "low-attaining" and "under-performing" schools, as the latter are those identified as doing not so well as other schools in similar circumstances. The free school meals band helps to sort schools into similar groupings.

"We still have a serious problem of under-performance in many parts of the country," says Hopkins. "It's a very complex picture. There are some very specific problems we are now trying to address, such as boys' under-achievement in writing. We are awaiting the results of some research from Homerton College, Cambridge, about improving boys' achievement. That looks at the pace of lessons. We are also looking at the catch-up materials and booster materials for year 6 pupils and what they offer for boys. And we are looking at what we can do for all youngsters narrowly failing to get level 4 - that's a big issue."

Hopkins admits that there has been "a new energy" in the standards and effectiveness unit in Sanctuary Buildings since the arrival of the new secretary of state. Let's hope that energy keeps fizzing enough to ensure the improvements mean the targets are hit next time around.

The pilot

Singled out for intensive care - the 13 local education authorities taking part in the pilot:

Birmingham
Bristol
Coventry
Derbyshire
Greenwich
Hackney
Kent
Kingston-upon-Hull
Leicester city
Manchester
Newcastle upon Tyne
Sheffield
Wolverhampton