Transparency marches on

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer’s
ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money’s being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I’d recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that. They reveal finer detail about schools and results than has been made public before, such as about how ‘disadvantaged children’ (those on free school meals or in local authority care for at least six months) perform in individual schools. We’ve seen facts similar to today’s ‘only 33.9 per cent of disadvantaged pupils achieved five A*-C grade GCSEs including English and maths, compared to the national average of 58.2