Agenda item

8.1

The Committee received a report of Stephen Betts (Chief Executive, Learn Sheffield) providing a review of the impact of Sheffield’s School Improvement Strategy 2016-2018, including the role of primary school locality action plans, and also regarding the development of a new School Improvement Strategy (2019-2022) together with details of the next steps in the review and development of the wider education strategy.

8.2

Also in attendance for this item were Councillor Abtisam Mohamed (Cabinet Member for Education and Skills), Andrew Jones (Interim Head of Primary and Targeted Intervention) and Dan Rice (Performance and Analysis Service).

8.3

Members of the Committee raised questions, and the following responses were provided:-

·             It would seem very likely that lower attendance would be a big driver in terms of deprivation, but it was not possible to give any conclusive response at the meeting.

·             The reasons why the Authority did not use national free school meals and national non free school meals as a comparative measure was that it mirrored Ofsted’s approach of using the national non free school meal group as a comparator.  However, such data was broken down to free and non-free in other reports.

·             Learn Sheffield does seek to identify other local authorities or groups of local authorities who have performed strongly in relation to national benchmarks, but this has proved very difficult. The performance of some pupil groups, in particular, white British pupils, who also had other protected characteristics, such as pupil premium or SEND, was a national challenge.

·             It had proved very challenging to recruit to a post of Deputy Chief Executive at Learn Sheffield, mainly due to the small scale of the partnership model.  Such challenges had been faced in other local authority areas and, in terms of going forward, Learn Sheffield was trying to be more innovative in terms of how it worked with its partners in order to try and mitigate any potential challenges.

·             The reason for referencing the fact that Sheffield had outperformed in terms of its deprivation rankings was simply due to the fact that for a period of 10 years previously, the Authority did not outperform such rankings.

·             It was acknowledged that the Strategy reflected a lean  partnership model.  Additional funding would be required to develop further intervention strategies.  As new strategies were developed, it was important to ensure that their impact was reviewed.

·             Those areas in which the Authority was underperforming, and where the gaps were not being closed, such as phonics, were fed into the School Improvement Strategy at a number of different levels. Learn Sheffield worked with the Authority to provide data to schools, and then the localities, which would support them to analyse exactly where the problems were.  The schools and localities would be asked to address any city-wide issues as part of their respective Action Plans.  There was a need to identify additional funding to help implement more intervention strategies at a city level.

8.4

RESOLVED: That the Committee:-

(a)      notes (i) the contents of the report now submitted, together with the information now reported and the responses to the questions raised and (ii) the resolution in Item 7.4 (c); and

(b)      thanks Councillor Abtisam Mohamed, Steven Betts, Andrew Jones and Dan Rice for attending the meeting and responding to the questions raised.