To consider a report of the Director of Education, Standards, Performance and Quality Assurance.

The Director Education Standards, Quality and Performance went through the report that had been distributed with the agenda. This was a follow on from a piece of work that had been done by the Overview and Scrutiny Committee a few years prior and the Interim Director detailed the areas that had changed since that work had been done. The first section of the report covered the areas where children were struggling. The Committee were told about the graduated approach that the Council was taking within Children’s services and that a key part of this approach was reducing the gap in attainment.

The Committee were told that while the term disadvantaged had a broad definition generally within Children’s services it related to children who received Pupil Premium funding and free school meals. The pupil premium was given to schools and the Council had no say in how the schools spent this funding. A Committee Member asked whether there was any way that the Council held schools to account for how they spent these funds. The Interim Director stated that the Council did do some work with the schools they supported around pupil premiums. The Council discussed Pupil Premiums in the conversations that they had with academies but there was very little that they could do influence them or hold them to account.

The Director then went through the four Trafford early years priorities. Within the four priorities there were many pieces of work which would help to close the attainment gap including having highly detailed place based plans in place for the areas where there was low attainment and a health visitor review which would establish Early Help delivery and create links into the wider offer.

The Committee were shown some statistics which showed that by key stage two disadvantage children were doing better against national statistics but there was still a gap between them and their peers within Trafford. Tackling the ongoing gap in attainment was a main focus of the work in this area. By key stage four there had been a narrowing of the gap and by that point disadvantaged children who attended grammar schools achieved the same levels of attainment as their peers. At high schools Trafford had invested resources in narrowing the gap and there had been a reduction in the attainment gap during that time.

The Director informed the Committee that the Pupil Premium Network, which was a forum where schools discussed pupil premiums and to shared best practice, had been launched in October. It was hoped that this Network would help to ensure that pupil premiums were utilised correctly and that the forum would hold schools to account. A Member of the Committee enquired as to how the Network would work and they were told that one of the school improvement deputies had aligned the meetings with the deputy forum meetings. The Network then held additional reviews in between the meetings.

A Committee Member asked whether there was any evidence that schools were not  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4