Sheffield Performance: Improvement Through Partnership

Improving outcomes for Sheffield children and schools

Written by Stephen Betts (Chief Executive – Learn Sheffield)

Learn Sheffield celebrated its first birthday at the start of this term. Our motto is ‘improvement through partnerships’, so the obvious question is “What kind of outcomes did those partnerships help Sheffield schools and Sheffield children to achieve last year?”

Talking about pupil outcomes, at the start of the school year, is always tricky. There will still be changes to the data and we don’t have a full picture of national performance in all sectors yet. The national data is crucial because it is the relative performance of the city compared to the rest of the country that really tells us how our performance stacks up.

This is true in every year, but in 2016 this is further complicated by the introduction of new tests and new measures. This makes it harder to draw conclusions about what the outcomes are telling us and limits the number of things that can be sensibly compared to previous years. With all of that said – what do we know so far?

Starting with the youngest children, in Foundation Stage, we know that 69% of children achieved the ‘good level of development’ key measure. This was an increase of 4% points and means that Sheffield has matched the national average. We also saw the ‘inequality gap’ close by 4% points, which means that the performance of pupils with the lowest starting points has also improved. 

At the end of the primary phase (Year 6) we know that the proportion of pupils working at or above the ‘expected standard’ in the key combined measure in reading, writing and maths is 52%. This means that Sheffield has also narrowed the gap to the national average here, this time from 2% to 1% point. The proportion of Sheffield children achieving the higher standard/greater depth in all three subjects was 5%, which matched the national average.

We also now know that Sheffield’s provisional Local Authority ranking has improved across all of the Year 6 outcomes. The combined measure ranking has risen from 116 to 92 (out of 150). This is the first time that Sheffield has been ranked above its deprivation ranking (which is 104). In other words, our Y6 children performed better than the level of challenge they faced.

In the secondary sector our GCSE data suggests that Sheffield has improved by 2% points in the previous key measure (5 GCSEs A* to C, including English and Maths) to 56%. The new key measure is called Progress 8 and measures the progress made from the beginning to end of secondary school in a narrower range of subjects, compared to the progress made by young people with similar starting points across the country. Early indications suggest that Sheffield may have a positive outcome overall as a city. This would mean that Sheffield pupils have made slightly more progress than children across the country with the same starting points.

Finally, in terms of school outcomes we ended last year with 81.8% of Sheffield schools judged to be good or better by Ofsted. This was an increase of 5.2% points last school year and 10.5% points since January 2015. The rate of improvement in Sheffield has been two and a half times the rate of national improvement, so again the gap has narrowed significantly.

Taken as a whole, the signs are that 2016 has been a good year for Sheffield. We can be pleased that, although Sheffield children have lower than national starting points on average, we are now matching the national average or are very close to it, across our education system. This represents a continuation of an upward trend over recent years, for which everyone in our education community should be congratulated.

Whilst we can enjoy this success we must continue to be more ambitious than this for the children and young people of Sheffield. It is time to stop talking about closing the gap to national and work towards matching the performance of the highest performing areas of the country. Our progress has been based on closer partnership working and this will be the basis of our future success.