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Special Educational Needs: General Certificate of Secondary Education

Volume 494: debated on Monday 15 June 2009

To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families pursuant to the answer of 20 April 2009, Official Report, column 279W, on special educational needs: general certificate of secondary education, at how many mainstream schools which had between one and nine pupils with statements of special educational needs no such pupils achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE in 2008. (279910)

Statistical disclosure rules are operated to protect the inadvertent disclosure of personal information about an individual pupil. For achievement data, the recognised approach is to suppress school level performance information where there are 10 or fewer pupils at the end of key stage 4 in the school.

That is accepted practice in the published Achievement and Attainment Tables. Following that approach, it would not normally be possible to give school level performance information for schools with 10 or fewer pupils at the end of key stage 4 with statements of special educational needs.

While naming individual schools would potentially disclose personal information about individual pupils, simply stating the number of schools does not.

Additionally, in the previous answer, the approach was relaxed slightly to fewer than 10 pupils (rather than 10 or fewer) at the end of key stage 4 with statements of special educational needs.

There are 26 maintained mainstream schools with more than 10 pupils with statements of SEN at the end of key stage 4, where no pupils with statements of SEN achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C or the equivalent in 2008.

There are 43 maintained mainstream schools with 10 or more pupils with statements of SEN at the end of key stage 4, where no pupils with statements of SEN achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C or the equivalent in 2008.

As the number of pupils was over the 10 pupils threshold for those schools, they were named in previous answers.

There were 2,542 maintained mainstream schools at which between one and nine pupils at the end of key stage 4 had statements of special educational needs in 2008.

There were 1,279 maintained mainstream schools at which between one and nine pupils at the end of key stage 4 had statements of special educational needs and where no such pupils achieved five or more GCSEs at grade A* to C or the equivalent, in 2008.

To prevent inadvertent disclosure of personal information, it will not be possible to name those schools in subsequent answers.

The source of these data is the Achievement and Attainment Tables’ database.