Issue - meetings

To receive and consider the Education Update report.

Gillian Cole, Schools Service Manager presented the Education report.

Some of the main points made during her presentation are listed below:

·           During the summer term of 2021 schools continued to operate within the Department for Education (DfE) guidelines, with significant operational measures still in place;

·           Some off site school trips were re-instated towards the end of the summer term;

·           Some measures are still in place, such as the requirement that schools must continue to offer remote learning for those that cannot attend school because of Covid;

·           From 1 September 2021 there were changes to the mitigation restrictions, in line the government’s road map;

·           Schools have undertaken their own risk assessments and decided which measures they wished to continue with, depending on their context.  For example, some schools found that having staggered starts was helpful in terms of alleviating traffic around the school site, and decided to continue with this measure;

·           Lateral flow tests continue to be undertaken by secondary school pupils twice a week.  Lateral flow tests were also undertaken at schools before the term started;

·           School leaders continue to attend the weekly leadership team drop in sessions, with a high number of attendance.  Best practice is discussed in these sessions, with a public health consultant having attended the last session to give advice and guidance to schools;

·           A-Levels and GCSE’s moved to teacher assessed grades in 2021, this being a different method to the one used in 2020.  This incurred a significant increase in teachers’ workload and was a complex operation;

·           All performance tables remain suspended, with no national or local data available for analysis for the second year running;

·           Ofsted has undertaken some remote visits during 2020/21.  Those were monitoring visits with the aim to ensure that schools continued to provide good education in the current context.  Two schools in the Borough experienced those visits: Gorse Ride and Forest, both were judged to be providing effective education;

·           Substantive inspections were paused until September 2021.  Section 8 inspections (which cannot change the grading of a school) did take place in the summer term.  Section 8 inspections did, however, have the power to bring forward Section 5 inspections if it was found that the current grading no longer reflected the level of the school.  This happened to the Forest School (at the time of writing the report the result of this inspection was not available);

·           The full inspection programme had now re-started.  However, there is a delay of approximately 6 terms in the schedule;

·           The service was going to be working closely with the schools which were due to undergo inspections;

·           The report highlighted some of the key lines of work, such as: Racial equity at schools; therapeutical approaches and mental health strands.

During the discussion of the item the following comments were made:

·           Councillor Bray stated that the Forest School’s Ofsted report was now publicly available and that the school had been graded ‘Good’.  This was a fantastic result and a huge improvement from the previous grading.  She expressed  ...  view the full minutes text for item 18