Mind the Gap

Sources: here (table 3.2) and here (table 3.4). All references refer to academic years eg 2008 is 2007-08

Yeah, bad pun.

The bigger the gap, the worse the performance. North Yorkshire has been in the worst performing upper 25% (quartile) of all local authorities for all pupils with SEN for the last four academic years, excepting 2007 when it briefly dipped its toe just below the upper quartile.

The SEN attainment gap is known as National Indicator 104 by the DfE - link, p58.

The upper and lower quartiles give an indication of how spread out the data is - it allows us to say that in 2006 and 2009 (academic years) North Yorks is significantly inside the upper quartile, and therefore performing badly. Each quartile contains 25% of local authority results. Digging deeper, in 2009-10 North Yorkshire's percentile rank was 86.6%. That means 86.6% of local authorities performed better, and 13.4% performed worse.

We already know that at Key Stage 2 children with a statement who have autism perform at some of the lowest levels of any local authority (see this post) so the wide SEN gap is masking an even wider 'autism gap'.