School Banding - Wales
School Banding, originally called School Grading, was introduced in 2011 by the Welsh
Government. While different to the English league table model, it still produces annual
rankings of school performance with schools listed from Band 1 to Band 5.









1
Responding to a poll conducted by the TES Cymru, 62.2 per cent of teachers and
75.4 per cent of heads – said they did not believe the introduction of banding had
helped improve school standards.1
The banding system has consistently been criticised for its ‘yo-yo’ impact. The
number 1 ranked school in Wales in 2011 dropped over 150 places in one year.
The banding system has also been criticised for conflicting with Estyn reports. In
2012 a school which became the first ever to receive an Estyn evaluation of
‘outstanding’ in all aspects fell from Band 1 to Band 3 in the same year.
League tables are based on a narrow definition of pupil performance. It is impossible
to capture a school’s contribution to pupils’ wider education or to their social and
personal development in the current format.2
League tables act as perverse incentives. As the tables report the proportion of
pupils achieving the Government’s expected level of performance, they encourage
schools to concentrate on pupils at the borderline of achieving these indicators.
They provide no encouragement for schools to tailor provision for children working
above or below these expectations. The current approach to publication of test
results does not directly raise achievement or improve schools and it does not
benefit individual pupils.3
League table performance indicators had been scraped in 2004 by the then
Education Minister, Jane Davidson who said; “they do not have the support of either
the teaching profession or members of the public.”
Parents do not find league tables particularly useful for choosing schools 4 and the
general public does not support the tests and examinations on which league tables
are based. Some 61 per cent agree that “so much attention is given to exam results
that a pupil’s everyday classroom work counts for too little” and 64 per cent think
that “schools focus too much on tests and exams and not enough on learning for its
own sake.”5
Other accountability measures exist which make banding redundant. The Welsh
Government’s ‘My Local School’ website contains all the data from school banding
but without the final ranking system.6
The Welsh Government is now introducing a new categorisation system ranking
schools in one of four colour co-ordinated bands. However, banding remains in
http://community.tes.co.uk/tes_cymru/b/weblog/archive/2013/09/02/teachers-in-wales-quot-demoralised-quotby-reforms-exclusive-tes-survey-reveals.aspx
2 http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/team/hg/assessing-the-performance-of-schools.pdf
3 http://www.cbi.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2012/11/cbi-calls-for-overhaul-of-school-system-to-deliverfor-all/
4 National Centre for Social Research, British Social Attitudes: The 27th report, page 66, December 2010
5 National Centre for Social Research, British Social Attitudes: The 27th report, page 66, December 2010
6 http://mylocalschool.wales.gov.uk/
place. With banding, categorisation, Estyn inspections and a host of other, often
contradictory accountability measures, teachers, parents and pupils are being left in
limbo.