1
Summary
In this part of our secondary education inquiry we
have examined the evidence underpinning the Government's diversity
strategy. We have therefore focused our attention on the initiative
at the centre of this strategy: the specialist schools programme.
We have been particularly interested in assessing the extent
to which the Government's policies are supported by evidence.
Recent administrations have placed particular attention
on attaining diversity by creating or emphasising structural differences
between schools. The present Government has explicitly linked
this form of diversity with its efforts to raise standards. The
specialist schools programme has been identified as a school improvement
programme designed to raise pupil achievement. The scope for creating
diversity through the curriculum is, however, heavily circumscribed
by the requirement for all maintained schools to deliver the National
Curriculum.
The 2001 White Paper Schools Achieving Success
made much of the value of diversity and the necessary link between
diversity and choice as a means of improving attainment. The emphasis
on choice of this Government and its predecessors has resulted
in a significant mismatch of expectations. The rhetoric on choice
has, perhaps inevitably, not been matched by the reality of parental
preference in the allocation of school places.
When the Government first expanded the specialist
schools programme, the ability to select by aptitude was considered
a key feature for improving standards of attainment. It is clear
that the Government no longer considers selection by aptitude
to be central to the purpose of specialist schools. We, however,
are not satisfied that any meaningful distinction between aptitude
and ability has been made and have found no justification for
any reliance on the distinction between them.
We acknowledge the Department's renewed emphasis
on the collaborative and community aspects of the specialist schools
policy and of the initiatives being developed through the Diversity
Pathfinder project. We believe, however, that the nature of this
collaboration is at present insufficiently focussed on raising
pupil achievement and therefore recommend that future funding
for specialist schools and the basis of their evaluation should
be explicitly linked to measurable success in raising pupil achievement
in partner schools.
Key findings:
The key finding of our inquiry is the lack of
sufficient research evidence to indicate whether the choices the
Government is making in secondary education policy are based on
secure foundations. There has been very little research on the
impact of specialist schools on their neighbouring schools; the
Government has placed too much emphasis on a narrow range of research
on the comparative performance of specialist schools; and we have
found the 5 A*-C GCSEs indicator for attainment at 16 to be an
inadequate and misleading measure of pupil achievement.
Narrow and simplistic approaches to measuring
school improvement cannot provide adequate evidence as to the
efficacy of the Government's diversity policy across the ability
range. This raises questions as to the planned expansion of the
programme. Without further evaluation it is not possible to assess
the extent to which the apparent benefits of specialisation might
be extended across secondary education.
Schools which have achieved specialist school
status can be exciting places with high levels of pupil attainment.
The question we ask is whether this is due to the advantages
that extra funding brings, or the management process that schools
have to undertake, or something inherent in being a specialist
school. We urge the Government to engage in a more rigorous evaluation
of the current programme than has so far been attempted.
| 
