A few days ago in Parliament Chris Ruane MP asked a question which elicited an interesting response from the Minister for Schools, Nick Gibb. The question was “To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many children have been taught music in schools in each constituency in each of the last three years.” 

The response began “The Department does not record the number of pupils being taught particular subjects. The Department records the number of pupils entering into GCSE and A level examinations for each subject. This provides the best proxy for the figure requested; this figure is for local authorities and not constituencies.”

Few people are likely to be concerned that the data that is recorded is based on local authority areas rather than constituencies. However the fact that the only measure the Government has of our childrens education at this level is what exams are sat and obviously the results raises a question about how well they understand education in a statistical sense. It seems to me that the number of exams sat is a poor proxy for how many lessons are taught. Of course collecting the number of pupils taught and comparing it to the number of exams sat, could put certain schools under scrutiny in a negative way. However there are many ways of collecting data that do not need to lead to negative outcomes. But to fail to collect the data altogether seems rather strange.