Poor transport links connected to underperforming schools
A recent report has highlighted a significant overlap in those places with slow public transport and struggling secondary schools. The analysis from School Dash identified the North East as having a cluster of poor transport and underachieving schools.
Overall the report found that badly connected places were more likely to have low achieving secondary schools. Even in areas without much deprivation, schools which are more isolated are more likely to be underperforming and less likely to be judged outstanding. When comparing travel times, 31% of schools with fast transport links were judged as outstanding, while only 17% of those with slow links achieved this grade.
Redcar, South Shields and Jarrow were all identified as areas of deprivation and slow transport. The research highlights the importance of addressing wider contextual factors to improve school performance, an issue Schools North East has highlighted in our Manifesto for North East Education.
Any analysis of ‘school performance’ should look at contextualised data, in order to properly represent the impact of deprivation in the North East. Equally, measures relying on judgements made under the previous Ofsted framework, did not take into account this context as it heavily focused on ‘raw’ school data. The new Ofsted framework has shown a more promising move towards taking school context into account.