Every parent wants to be reassured that whatever school their child goes to they will get the best possible education.
As a parent of three children, it saddens me that there are still too many young people attending schools that have been consistently underperforming. We want more for our children and from our schools, and our Plan for Change will deliver just that.
It is not good enough that there are more than 600 schools that are considered to be “stuck” and have received several poor Ofsted judgements in a row.
RISE school improvement
This week we have announced that Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) is ramping up and advisers will be engaging in more than 200 schools.
There are more than 300,000 pupils across more than 600 stuck schools and it is high time that we make a change so that no child is left behind.
We cannot continue to let these children languish in schools that are not delivering the high standards we expect to see - we need every child to have the opportunity to achieve and thrive.
Our new RISE teams will help in our mission to drive high and rising standards, ensuring that swift action is taken to boost school improvement and get schools back on track and delivering the best education for pupils. We have now boosted the number of advisers to 65.
Collaboration is the key plank of RISE, with expert advisers from across the country sharing best practice to support schools on their improvement journey.
We know that some stuck schools may already be showing green shoots of improvement. Where that is the case, then RISE advisers will listen to and work with teachers and leaders to take improvement further for the benefit of pupils.
Eligible schools have already started to be paired with supporting organisations, many of which are high-performing multi-academy trusts. This partnership will last up to two years to ensure that the school stays on the right trajectory.
Trusts sharing best practice
We want to learn from the work that these trusts have done to drive up standards and work with them as partners to succeed on delivering better outcomes for children.
As well as specific targeted action, RISE will also provide a universal service that every school across the country can benefit from to drive high and rising standards.
This service will focus on four national priorities: attendance, attainment (with a focus on English and maths), Reception-year quality and inclusion.
I have already seen the benefit of this service in action for myself, having joined one of the regional attendance conferences held in March.
These conferences have been a huge success, reaching more than 2,000 attendees. They are an excellent example of the support that will be on offer via RISE, and the collaboration that RISE teams will drive across the system.
It was fantastic to see so many teachers and leaders come together to share how they have worked to improve attendance at their schools, ensuring that every child has a strong foundation of learning that is rooted in the classroom.
As RISE progresses, we will see more events like these, bringing schools together to foster collaboration across the country.
School accountability
Yesterday our consultation on proposed reforms to the school accountability system closed. We will now analyse the responses we have received and publish our response before the end of the summer term.
This isn’t the end of our engagement with the sector on school accountability. We will be setting up a RISE operational stakeholder group to advise on delivery to ensure that views from the sector are properly reflected.
With the helping hand of RISE, schools across the country can work together and, through sharing best practice and collaboration, deliver on our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity so that every child can achieve and thrive.
Catherine McKinnell is minister for school standards
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