Much is made of the rising success of Academies.
In 2009 Ed Balls boasted that the Academies GCSE results that June showed a 5% improvement on 2008. When challenged to produce the results that proved that we were told we had to wait for the official release of the results in January 2010.
When the 2009 GCSE results were officially released in January 2010 our analysis of the results showed that while Ed Ball’s headline figure may be true, it hid some other disturbing information.
122 Academies entered their pupils for GCSEs in 2009. Of these 36% are in the national challenge.
74 of these 122 Academies have now entered pupils for 2 or more years.
of these 74, 32% (24 Academies) saw their results fall (Appendix A).
and 59% (44 Academies) are in the National Challenge (Appendix B).