Migrants who speak English as a second language get better GCSE grades than British kids
Department for Education figures reveal huge north-south divide in English secondary schools
PUPILS who speak English as a second language are outperforming their native British counterparts at GCSE for the first time, official figures show.
Children who grow up speaking another language are scoring higher marks by the age of 16 according to the Department for Education.
Data published today also showed one in eight secondary schools are now underperforming in England.
Education chiefs revealed 365 schools dropped below the Government’s performance threshold compared to one in ten - or 282 - in 2016.
Officials blamed the rise on technical changes to the points system used by government statisticians.
But it means more than a quarter of a million pupils are being taught at secondaries that fall below the Government’s “floor standard”.
The figures also revealed a huge north-south gap with the highest proportion of struggling schools in the North-East and lowest in the capital.
School leaders said the new grading system affecting English and maths has complicated the way school performance is calculated using a combination of old and new grading systems.
School Standards Minister Nick Gibb said: “Academic standards are rising in our schools thanks to our reforms and the hard work of teachers, with 1.9million more children in good or outstanding schools than in 2010.
“These results reinforce this success, with teachers and pupils responding well to the new more rigorous curriculum introduced by this government.”
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, urged parents and governors not to leap to judgment on under performing schools.
He said: “As the DfE itself says in today’s statistics, these changes are the main reason why there has been an increase in the number of schools which are deemed to be below the ‘floor standard’ for Progress 8.
“It is extremely unfair that more schools find themselves in this situation because of complex changes to the way in which this is calculated.
“They only tell us a limited amount about the true quality of a school.”