Census Day is Thursday 1st October 2009
Why do I have to do complete School Census?
School Census is statutory for all maintained Nursery, Primary, Secondary, middle deemed Primary, middle deemed Secondary, Special and non-maintained special schools, Academies and City Technology Colleges. The following factors are the business drivers:
It is consistent with the overall vision underpinning the New Relationship with Schools (NRWS) programme which includes:
collect data once and use many times;
collection of data should be automatic; and
data collected should be that which a well prepared school uses themselves or be justified with a clear business case
It assumes that much of the data are already held in schools’ MIS ready for transfer on Census day and so the need for data entry on the day is kept to a minimum.
Given that the majority of the data collected at pupil level are those which a well prepared school uses themselves, the data should be kept up to date on an event driven basis (ie data should be kept up to date by the school as soon as it is aware of any change or addition) and so the burden of collection by the Department should not be high.
The majority of data collected are as defined in the Common Basic Data Set (CBDS).
How are data used?
The data are widely used by DCSF policy divisions, other government departments, LAs, external agencies and educational researchers.
Analysis of individual pupil records supports the drive to raise standards, provides accurate targeting of funding, and the monitoring and development of policy. For example, information about the numbers of pupils, teachers and education support staff is used to monitor child:adult ratios. Information on class sizes, pupils with statements, pupils with SEN but without statements (School Action or Early Years Action and School Action Plus or Early Years Action Plus), free school meals, ethnicity, absences and permanent exclusions is used to monitor the Government’s social inclusion policy. Pupil numbers are used for funding LAs and schools and contribute to the School and College Achievement and Attainment Tables exercise (previously known as Performance Tables).
Data will also continue to be used nationally for the National Assessment Agency (NAA) DC2 Pupil Test Registration process. The data are used to support other key areas involving LAs such as Revenue Support Grant and LA Benchmarking Tables. Without this information it would be very difficult for Ministers, Parliament, central and local government, pressure groups and the public to monitor government policies and their effectiveness.