Labour’s off-rolling crackdown could finally “shed light on a practice that is currently invisible” but must be supported by councils and trusts to work, experts have said.
The schools white paper unveiled plans to tighten up scrutiny over pupil movements, and to interrogate the leaders of schools suspected of illegal exclusions or other shady methods to skew cohorts.
Kiran Gill, chief executive of inclusion charity The Difference, said this “has been an area of insufficient data accountability”.
“It shouldn’t be up to investigative journalists or brilliant statisticians to highlight where there’s a system challenge.”
Concerning practices
The government will launch a new internal dashboard that identifies school-level trends “that could suggest off-rolling or other concerning practices, including off-site direction and managed moves”.
It will use this to conduct an annual review of how children move through the education system. Officials will “follow up on a targeted basis with responsible bodies to better understand and challenge where there are possible concerns”.
Off-rolling is when a pupil is removed from a school’s roll without a permanent exclusion, when it is primarily in the best interests of the school, not the child.
Education Policy Institute (EPI) research two years ago found tens of thousands of pupils have “unexplained” moves out of school each year, with poorer children more likely to be impacted.
At least some of these exits are managed moves. These are allowed when agreed between heads, parents and pupils, but constitute off-rolling if not in a pupil’s best interests.
Fill data gaps
The think tank urged ministers to launch “a central data reporting system which captures all moves and the reasons for them”.
The white paper said the clampdown will “pay particular attention to schools where SEND, free school meal or demographic trends appear significantly out of sync with their local context”.
Jon Andrews, the EPI’s interim CEO, said the government was “right to use a ‘curious’ approach, because a data dashboard can identify unusual patterns but cannot, on its own, tell you whether any individual move was in a child’s interest”.
However, there are “gaps in the data that the government will need to address”. Managed moves are not recorded nationally and schools are not required to report reasons for pupil departures if they are not permanently excluded.
“Data which captures all moves and the reasons for them, including managed moves and moves into home schooling, is required,” Andrews said.
‘Perverse incentives’
A The Difference report last year told government, councils and trusts to “take an active role in identifying and improving non-representative schools”.
“This white paper recommendations are a recognition that the department and the governance structures around schools – councils and MATs – need to be part of policing the worst of those perverse incentives,” Gill said.
The white paper said the Department for Education will try to share more timely pupil movement data with Ofsted to help it identify “unacceptable” techniques.
Where “bad practice” is unearthed, schools will likely be issued with an ‘urgent improvement’ grade for leadership and governance.
Inclusion bases and AP
Dr Carlie Goldsmith, of education charity Impetus, believes the proposed off-rolling changes “will shed light on a practice that is currently invisible”.
She offered a “word of caution”, warning that “nationalising the system makes it difficult to spot patterns of poor practice at the local level”.
The department also confirmed it will “make processes clearer and more consistent across all schools, including how pupils access inclusion bases within mainstream settings”.
It will also “strengthen expectations for reintegrating pupils from alternative provision” and set requirements for governors and trustees to monitor the movement of children.
Government plans to tighten fair banding rules
Ministers’ inclusion drive could be boosted by new school guidance on how “fair banding” admissions approaches can alter the make-up of classes, campaigners argue.
The government is planning to tighten the rules around fair banding – a practice used by secondaries to admit a proportion of pupils from different ability groups based on a test – to ensure it “produces representative intakes”.
It also wants to make the operation of the controversial arrangements “clearer” by requiring schools to set out more details about how they work. No further information on the changes have been released.
Trinity Multi Academy Trust chief executive Michael Gosling, who runs schools that use fair banding, said: “The proposals seem reasonable and fair because they talk about more details being required to ensure clarity, which I don’t think anybody would argue with.
“However, rather ironically, they also lack the detail needed to provide clarity on what that means in practice.”
Current rules state fair banding can be used to produce an intake that is representative of the ability of applicants to a school, the ability of children locally or the national average.
‘Fair and objective’
Requirements “must be fair, clear, and objective”. Trusts and councils must publish their schools’ admission requirements, and the process for banding and decisions, including details of the tests.
When approached for more information, the Department for Education did not outline in what ways arrangements are unclear now.
Charlotte O’Regan, of social mobility charity Sutton Trust, said: “It’s the current implementation of fair banding that’s the challenge, not the mechanism itself.
“Schools could benefit from support and guidance on the potential impact of each option that’s in the school admissions code, in a way that ensures inclusion is at the heart of their decisions.”
Schools Week revealed in October that a controversial decision allowing the Carlton Bolling school in Bradford to introduce the practice had been withdrawn by the admissions watchdog over allegations that important evidence was ignored.
The approval was later reinstated.
