by political editor Paul Francis

Government officials are refusing to say why they decided to order troubleshooters in to help Kent’s poorest performing secondary schools.. but have admitted some of its data was incomplete.

The Department for Childrens Schools and Families (DCSF) says it would not be in the public interest to release information used when children’s secretary Ed Balls contoversially named and shamed Kent County Council last month.

It follows a request made by the KM Group under the Freedom of Information Act for information used by the Government in reaching its decision about Kent. In its response, the DCSF has admitted some of the data it did use has not yet been validated.

KCC was told last month the Government was not satisfied with the progress being made at 33 secondary schools who are part of its National Challenge initiative - the highest number of anywhere in the country. Several are in Maidstone and across west Kent.

The move triggered a political row, with Conservative county education chiefs criticising the Government’s intervention.
Now the DCSF says it is not prepared to disclose any information about why it decided to act.

It says some of the detail will come out when official school league tables are published in the New Year. However, it admits some of the statistics it relied on had not been fully validated.

In its response to our request, the department said: “Although it is the case that detailed statistics regarding these results should be publicly available, the schools’ self-supported results are yet to undergo these validation processes.”

It adds that while those results indicated how many schools were likely to be below the 30 per cent threshold set for GCSE passes they “should not be released as a firm list of schools in this category as they are subject to change.”

Doing so “could have potentially damaging consequences for the schools concerned” - which was ironically the criticism that was levelled at Mr Balls by some headteachers when he singled out Kent schools.

The DCSF also refused to release details of other information supplied by KCC, schools and its own advisers about standards saying that this too would not be in the public interest because if it was made public “these details may make them unwilling to provide us with similar information in the future.”
If the department was unable to “garner the full range of evidence...any decisions relating to the support required in each local authority would be based on incomplete information.”

The DCSF was asked to comment but has not done so.