Why are schools ‘off-rolling’ pupils?

Schools dramatically change a child’s life chances, as I’ve seen in my 24 years of teaching. How we measure their performance couldn’t be more important, but in recent years it’s gone wrong.

The key metric that secondary schools in England are judged on is called ‘Progress 8’. It looks at the progress that students make across eight subjects from the end of primary school to GCSE, and then ranks schools against each other. It’s zero-sum: for every winner, there is a loser. Some school leaders treat ‘good’ scores with humility and caution. Others plaster their badge everywhere.

However, it’s too easy to game the system and too many schools are taking advantage in ugly ways. The published figures do not tell us which students are counted in a school’s data and which aren’t.

The most egregious example is ‘off-rolling’ pupils, which is technically illegal but there are some wheezes. Years ago, some school leaders worked out that if you remove underperforming students from your roll before January, then they are not counted on the school’s results. Schools would move them into ‘alternative provision’, and then they won’t come up in the figures. Some pupils are marked down as ‘guests’, a status that usually describes children who are between schools. This toxic practice reached its peak in 2017 when 49,000 Year 11 students disappeared from rolls without explanation.

Ofsted, the regulator, initially called out a few high-profile cases. But a recent report from the Centre for Social Justice has again identified sharp spikes in Year 11 students moving off mainstream rolls to pupil referral units shortly before the January census. Not all of these moves will be improper, but the writers of the report conclude that some schools ‘are removing pupils with lower attainment, who could compromise the school’s overall performance data’.

The numbers being home-schooled have shot up too: they have risen from 37,500 in 2016 to 86,200 last year. It is hard to believe that the home-schooling philosophy has suddenly grown so popular. Instead, what too many of us hear from parents is that they were encouraged to consider the ‘option’ of taking their child out of school. The CSJ says that some ‘vulnerable and/or lower performing pupils are coerced into moving to home education’. The end result? A better Progress 8 score. 

Most schools have good intentions, and genuinely want to help children get better grades. But we know that some schools go down the route of off-rolling. Some schools end up with lower proportions of pupils with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), while some are much higher. Every school should be asked whether they are educating a proportionate number of children with SEND. 

This is the government’s mess to sort out. It should scrap the single word Ofsted verdicts on schools, and it should check the roll of every school every year. At the moment, there is no reason to trust league tables.