LEAGUE TABLES SPECIAL: Swindon's director of education Dr Mike Lusty and Peter Wells, chairman of the Swindon Association of Secondary Heads, give their reaction.
Dr Mike Lusty. Congratulations to all our schools in Swindon. This year's results are to be celebrated. They represent a lot of hard work and the students deserve credit for their achievements.
This kind of success does not happen easily. The examination results are a culmination of a lot of hard work and support to help the students achieve their desired grades. Results like these made everybody's work worthwhile.
This year Swindon achieved a 44.5 per cent pass rate, which is a small but significant improvement from last year and shows that pupils' performance in Swindon is on the increase.
GCSE and GNVQ examinations are just one aspect of the many achievements that our students have gained throughout their school careers. Schools in Swindon have also succeeded in areas that are not recognised in this list of results. For example, Swindon has achieved a 79.4 per cent pass rate in the vocational qualifications compared to the national average of 75.7 per cent.
Value added measures, which are not yet publicised for Swindon, show that many of our schools are providing a positive score. Value added scores measure how much progress a pupil has made according to their prior attainment and are therefore a much more important indicator than that the raw performance data.
Once again I commend our schools for their hard work in achieving these results against the background of Swindon being the lowest funded unitary authority in the country.
How much more schools might achieve if the funding for every pupil in Swindon was brought up to the average of other unitary authorities we cannot say. What we do know is that given the means, our schools are capable of delivering even better results.
Peter Wells. Swindon schools' GCSE results this year reflect the success, hard work and real achievement of pupils and teachers from every quarter of the town.
There are important points to celebrate in Swindon. Half our secondary schools achieved results above the national average and seven of our ten secondary schools recorded substantial improvement or remained at a steady point above the national averages. The most pleasing results were those of our schools in the greatest difficulty where significant improvements took place.
Churchfields, however, has faced extraordinary difficulties mostly beyond the school's direct control and arising from decisions taken, albeit it good faith, by the LEA. I am aware that Ofsted has expressed reservations about the school in the past but the staff and pupils in Churchfields have addressed many if not all of those reservations successfully.
What I am also aware of is the fact that many of the departments and pupils achieved results this year that exceeded or matched the targets set for the school. They did all that was expected of them and more.
As ever the broad issue of inadequate funding of our schools must be borne in mind. All our pupils have been funded throughout their school lives at the very lowest levels and yet they have achieved success which is far above what might be expected.
When the Council decides its budget for next year there is a commitment from members to dramatically improve the resources reaching our schools. But over and above the efforts of our local politicians is the critical need for central government to increase the resources reaching Swindon.
We need the support and understanding of our local MPs and we need the direct action of the Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, to secure national recognition of the difficulties we face and the national funding to help us address them.
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