To: All Primary Phase Schools

All Secondary and Special Schools (for information)

Dear Headteacher

As I’m sure you appreciate, the targets being set for the Year 2002 and the results achieved at that time will be under considerable public and political scrutiny. The LEA has an agreed set of targets published in the Education Development Plan. Recent achievements in national tests have shown real improvement in Norfolk in the last few years. I received a letter from Michael Barber (DfEE) on the 20^th September which comments on Norfolk’s results in Key Stage 2 as follows;

In mathematics, your results show an increase of 5% points to 70%. This means that your results have improved by 15% points over the last two years compared to the national average of 13% points. The very good progress that you have made over the last two years suggests that, with 6% points to go, you are broadly on track to achieve your 2002 target."

The process of setting challenging but achievable targets has been carried out very effectively in many schools in the last couple of years. However;

1. there have been a number of changes amongst headteachers in recent years,
2. there was some concern last year about the targets set for 2001 which in a large number of schools were judged to be well below the expected levels of improvement that the national strategies should be achieving,
3. some headteachers said that they set the statutory targets but had not yet integrated the target setting process into their overall school improvement strategies.

Therefore, we have produced the attached short document to act as a prompt to discussions with LEA colleagues and governors about the importance of setting targets during the remainder of this term. You will find the message straight forward and supportive, I commend it to you.

The date for submitting statutory targets is the 31^st December 2000 and RDAs will provide you with a proforma for submitting these so that we, in turn, can send them to the DfEE as a new annex 1 to the Education Development Plan. To try to get an early indication about the extent to which school targets aggregate up to the LEA targets we have asked RDAs and the literacy and numeracy teams to work with you to get the earliest possible indication of each school’s targets. I hope you will help in this process by providing as much information about progress as is possible.

As we did last year we are recommending that targets are set in KS1. This has been a significant feature in the increasing success of children in KS1. Results have been slightly above the national figures in all areas except for spelling. We recommend that the target setting process should be applied to this Key Stage as well as to the statutory areas in KS2 and KS4.

The national results for KS3 have been disappointing in the overall lack of significant improvement. In English Norfolk’s results are the same as the national figures but results in mathematics are 3% points and in science 5% points above the national results. This is encouraging and we recommend building on this by setting targets in this key stage as well.

Results in Key Stage 4 have been slightly up on last year but we have not managed to maintain the excellent progress of the last few years. With results appearing to plateau around the 48% (5A*-C) level we still have some way to go to achieve the 52% target set in the Education Development Plan. As in the other key stages, I know there is considerable expertise in setting targets in most schools but I would ask you again to take the attached document as a prompt to setting the highest possible targets for 2002.

If you have any queries about this please discuss with your RDA or contact Sue Cosson or Fred Corbett.

Yours sincerely