via CMPO Viewpoint (A Blog from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation) by Rebecca Allen (first published on the IOE blog)
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Minister for Schools, has been making a series of speeches over the past month about "closing the gap" in the attainment between pupils from deprived and more affluent backgrounds. Yesterday, he warned that schools should not be judged as outstanding by Ofsted if they failed to close the gap, a goal that sounds fair and even laudable in principle, but I believe is rather unfair in practice.
The "gap" is the difference in GCSE achievement between the average for pupils who are eligible for free school meals and the average for those who are not. Pupils eligible for free school meals have similar characteristics across schools since they all come from families claiming some sort of benefit. The problem is that the background of pupils who are not eligible for free school meals (FSM) will vary considerably across schools, since the group includes both those with bankers and with cleaners as parents.
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