Lord Hunt of Kings Heath – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Hunt of Kings Heath on 2015-12-14.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what percentage of (1) all multi-academy trusts, and (2) multi-academy trusts with at least five schools, achieve above average value added.

Earl of Courtown

Value added scores are routinely published for individual schools as part of the department’s performance tables, which include the functionality to filter results by an academy sponsor.

The department does not publish a summary of value added scores for each academy chain or multi-academy trust. Simple aggregations of performance measures can lead to misleading conclusions about performance within a chain since they will often reflect the type of schools that have entered into the chain relationship.

Earlier this year, the department published a statistical working paper to consider how these issues may be addressed and invited comments from users. This can be found in the attachment to this answer.