Posted By Site Administrator at 13/07/2010 10:28:16
How did support for the Sats boycott vary across the country?
I have carried out an analysis of government information provided last week on the schools which decided to follow the advice of the NAHT and the National Union of Teachers and refuse to take part in the administration of the tests this year.
It reveals variations in the take-up of the boycott in different areas of England.
Scrutiny of this information by local authority shows that in 24* local council areas, at least 50 per cent of schools joined the boycott. This represents almost one in six local authorities overall, and will mean that league table results, to be published early next year, will be almost unusable if based on test data alone in these areas. Performance tables, then, will rely especially heavily in these areas on teacher assessment judgements.
The North East appears to have shown the strongest support for the boycott, having four of the top 10 authorities ranked on the percentage of their schools backing the action. Hartlepool tops the list overall, with all of its schools taking part in the boycott, and with North Tyneside; Redcar and Cleveland; and Middlesbrough all having more than three quarters of their schools boycotting the Sats.
Schools in this region tend to have higher-than-average numbers of children eligible for free school meals, government figures show. However, more prosperous areas are also represented in the higher echelons of this table. Rutland, for example, which official data suggest has the smallest proportion of primary children eligible for free meals in England, had 15 of its 17 schools taking part in the boycott. At 88 per cent, this was the second highest level of support for the action of any authority.
At the bottom of the table, 10 local authorities appear, from the government’s list, to have had none of their schools joining the boycott. I find the contrast between local authorities in nearby areas particularly interesting. In Islington, in north London, for example, none of the 44 schools is listed as boycotting the tests, though in each of nearby Haringey, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, more than half of schools joined the action.
Other reasonably large authorities with no schools joining the boycott included the Wirral, Knowsley and St Helens.
If there is a pattern, it is one of a slight North-South contrast. The North East; Yorkshire and the Humber; and the North West had the highest percentages of schools taking part in the boycott, while the East Midlands; South East; and East of England, had the fewest.
Also, despite the exceptions in individual authorities described above, the regions of the country with relatively high numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals tended to have more schools joining the boycott, while the four districts with the lowest proportions of free school meals pupils – the South East, the East of England, the South West and the East Midlands – saw the lowest take-up of the boycott.
Overall, the national proportion of 26 per cent of schools taking part in the boycott represented, I think, a strong vote of no-confidence in the current high-stakes testing regime from a constituency which, as you know, takes industrial action very reluctantly.
I wrote a reaction to the national boycott figures last week. It can be viewed here
I would also be interested in comments from anyone with any observations, perhaps from a local perspective, about these figures. Please either comment below or email me at warwickmansell@gmail.com
Local authorities taking part in the boycott, with the percentage of schools joining the NAHT/NUT action:
Top 10: Hartlepool (100 per cent); Rutland (88 per cent); North Tyneside (84 per cent); Sefton (82 per cent); Middlesbrough (81 per cent); Redcar and Cleveland (78 per cent); Stoke-on-Trent (70 per cent); Torbay (68 per cent); Dudley (67 per cent); Calderdale (67 per cent).
Bottom 10: Islington; Halton; Knowsley; Wirral; St Helens; Isle of Wight; Bournemouth; Thurrock; Kingston upon Thames; Bracknell Forest, all of which had no schools boycotting the tests.
Government regions, with percentage of schools joining the boycott: North East (39 per cent); Yorks and Humber (35); North West (31); Outer London (28); Inner London (27); West Midlands (26); South West (20); East Midlands (18); South East (15); East of England (12)
*The analysis is based on information stating which schools boycotted the Sats from the Department for Education. I’ve not included data from England’s two smallest local authorities – City of London and the Scilly Isles – which only have one primary school each. I compared the total number of schools taking part in the boycott for each LA with the department’s records of the number of primary schools in each local authority. This may slightly underestimate the support for the boycott in some authorities, as the department’s total for the number of primary schools in each local authority is slightly higher than the number it said last week should have administered the tests. This may be because of the presence of infants’ schools in the department’s figures for total number of of “primary” schools in each authority.
