3.4 The Government stated in its recent schools White Paper that parents' ability to choose a school will be enhanced by more standardised information on schools.16 The Department for Education (the Department) has developed a schools performance web tool that brings together established and new data releases in a single location on its website.17
3.5 The website helps parents to compare schools at the same stage of education, based on most types of information needed to support choice as set out in paragraph 3.2. The tool provides:
• key descriptive information, including school type and capacity, pupil and workforce characteristics;
• comparable information on school performance, including exam results for all key stages and new data on pupil performance, by low, middle and high attainers. The site also links to Ofsted reports and inspection results; and
• information on school finances. The tool provides income and spending data, for example, spending on teaching staff.
3.6 The website does not provide parents' or children's feedback on their experiences of the school. Users can, however, access Ofsted inspection reports, which often contain summaries of the views of parents, children and governors. Ofsted also launched its Parent View website in October 2011 to collect and report parents' feedback on schools.18
3.7 The information provided is standardised and comparable across all schools in England, with the following exceptions:
• Spending data for academies is not recorded according to the categorisation used for school-level financial data included in the tool. The Department intends to publish academies' financial data on a comparable basis in 2012. Where academies are federated under one academy trust, the data will be made available at academy trust level rather than individual school level.
• The Department does not collect or publish certain data for independent schools, for example on key stage 2 attainment (because key stage 2 tests and external marking are optional), or pupil characteristics.
3.8 To support parental choice, the school performance tables provide in one place previously diffuse performance data. The level of public interest in that information has increased. The Department has reported that interaction with the website tool increased by 84 per cent in the last year, with 2.43 million views from September to November 2011, compared with 1.3 million views for the corresponding information in the same period of 2010.