Transparency marches on

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer's ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money's being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I'd recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that. They reveal finer detail about schools and results than has been made public before, such as about how ‘disadvantaged children’ (those on free school meals or in local authority care for at least six months) perform in individual schools. We've seen facts similar to today's ‘only 33.9 per cent of disadvantaged pupils achieved five A*-C grade GCSEs including English and maths, compared to the national average of 58.2 per cent in maintained schools’, before now. It's more the capacity to delve down, quickly and easily, to a school-by-school level that's new.

I've waxed enthusiastic about transparency before now, so I'll spare CoffeeHousers the full routine. Suffice to say that these new school tables should make parents more informed (and thus, to a lesser degree, boost choice), as well as ratchet up the pressure on under-performing schools. It's less about targets and rankings than good ol’ honest truth. The more information there is, the harder it is for bad schools to game the system (or, rather, the more likely it is that they'll be exposed if they try). And the decent schools will get the full credit they deserve. Speaking of which, it turns out that — after the ARK group's impressive results yesterday — GCSE results at academies in general improved at almost twice the national average.

What's particularly encouraging is that there's more to come. Apparently, the Department for Education should be releasing even more detailed subject-by-subject data next month, in the build-up to the full National Pupil Database in the middle of the year. The government is excited about what this great mine of information will mean not just for education but also for the cause of transparency itself — and understandably so. The hope is that people outside of government will get their hands all over it and start producing snazzy, digital school guides that will tell parents everything they need to know. And they might tell educators and politicians the occasional thing too. If, for instance, one school is doing particularly well at teaching French, then there it is — visit it, learn its secret, spread it. Everyone stands to gain from this sort of transparency, except the charlatans.