The UK Department for Education (DfE) has launched a consultation on ways to intervenein failing, underperforming and coasting schools. The document puts forward a new set of interventions specifically for ‘coasting’ schools, which are defined as those where fewer than 85% of pupils achieve the floor standards across reading, writing and mathematics in three consecutive years, and where pupils make insufficient progress. These schools would face interventions, such as support from teaching schools or national leaders of education, changes in the governance of the school (e.g. appointing additional governors, or replacing the governing body with an Interim Executive Board), or converting the school into a sponsored academy. In this blog, dr. Melanie Ehren questions the DfE’s definition of a ‘coasting’ school and the appropriateness of the interventions used to improve these schools.

You can read the full article here.

Author: Dr. Melanie Ehren (Reader at the UCL Institute of Education, m.ehren@ioe.ac.uk)