OFSTED finds that Faith Schools Outperform the Rest

Ofsted data has revealed that faith schools account for a disproportionate percentage of the country’s best-performing primary schools. The figures, released by the Department for Education, show that faith schools have continued to out-perform more traditional primary schools in tests for the core subjects. Faith schools have to follow the national curriculum, but they can choose what they teach in religious studies.

Indeed, religious schools accounted for as many as six out of ten primary schools where every pupil achieved the expected standard for English and maths age 11 years.

 

What’s more, faith schools continue to dominate at the top of the annual national league tables for results in these tests, despite the fact that they account front just a third of schools across the country.

“Every child must be challenged to achieve their best. These results show that some children who were struggling at seven have made real progress by 11 and are now performing as well, or even better, than we expect,” reflected a spokesman for the Department for Education.

“However, there are still too many cases where the opposite is true. It is unacceptable that children who made such bright starts to their school career have fallen back into the pack.”

He said, too, that exceptional teaching is often the difference between success and failure, adding that recent changes are designed to achieve that ambition.

 

Faith schools are, of course, often subject to intense criticism because they are perceived to attract a disproportionate amount of middle-class pupils, who are shown to perform better in an academic context.

And the data shows that some 896 primaries scored 100 per cent in the measure of how many of their 11-year-olds reached Level 4, which is the standard expected of their age group.

Of these, some 552 were faith schools, thereby accounting for nearly 62 per cent of the total.