Since the mid-1980s, successive governments have been publishing an increasing amount of data on school performance with a view to making schools more accountable to parents and communities. The School Prospectus and the Annual Governors’ Report are now both official documents with required headings and the OFSTED PANDA database has expanded exponentially. As the next step in the process, David Miliband has proposed bringing all of this information together into a school profile. Whether or not this would replace the traditional prospectus has yet to be determined but it would certainly sit alongside it as one of the school’s key school documents.

Superficially, the idea is attractive. Currently, the presentation of this data is fragmented. It is hard for parents to track the figures down or to assess how up-to-date they are and whether they are relevant. Bringing everything together would provide a broader and, possibly, a more accurate picture of a school. However, while a profile might reflect statistical success and allow an achieving school to crow about its success, it might also be used to damn a school that was struggling against the odds.

A DfES Consultation Paper seeks the views of schools and teachers with a deadline of mid June. Although it asks the question, the consultation is not really over the principle of whether or not to have a profile but over the detail of what it should contain and how it should be operated. While it is understandable in some ways that the DfES does not want to dig over old ground, there is an issue here. On the one hand, schools are being encouraged to be autonomous and self-governing and that, logically, should include how they present themselves to their community but, on the other, the school profile is certain to be constraining in terms of the information which must be provided. There is also a parallel argument that schools should find their own ways of addressing their local communities. A stodgy set of figures might go down well with accountants in Surrey but simply make the school appear to be an alien institution in a working-class area of the North East.

Notwithstanding this concern, what would a school profile contain? The consultation paper suggests that it would include benchmarked data on attainment and progress, and the most recent OFSTED assessment and school self-assessment. In addition, it would describe what the school offered in terms of the curriculum and extracurricular activities, its priorities for development, its links to the community and other contextual information. The DfES believes that all this can be contained in no more than four sides of A4!

While the school might publish a paper version, the profile would be an electronic document, retrievable from government websites to allow the comparison of schools. Parents, governors and teachers would all have access to the profile. As far as possible, the school profiles for different types of schools would be as similar as possible.

The problem for a document of this kind lies in the detail. For example, benchmarked statistical data on performance might be acceptable if the benchmarks were national but what if the benchmark was derived from local schools? Value added data would also be included with all of its weaknesses. And, given the timescale for the preparation of performance data, a school that was seeking to improve might find itself handicapped by the data it was obliged to include.

With an emphasis on personal learning, the profile would include information about the progress made by pupils who were above or below average and those with special needs. Again this might be fine for many schools but it would be easy to create a mythology surrounding the individual school – perhaps that it catered best for below average pupils or featured an above average proportion of children with special needs.

Another issue is linked to the presentation of inspection findings. The profile is intended to include the most recent OFSTED assessment set against the school’s most recent self-assessment but it is not clear how the OFSTED report would be summarised and whether it would be entirely statistical or evaluative. Also, the ‘current’ OFSTED findings can be significantly out of date.

Worries about OFSTED raise the bigger question of how to balance the statistical data with the school’s own view of its progress and what it can offer to the community. Typically in education, there is a tendency for statistical data to overwhelm evaluative findings so that if, for example, parents are comparing the performance of two schools what appears to be an exceptional value-added score could easily be given too much weight when, in fact, it is simply the end-product of a low starting point. The other problem with national performance data is that schools know how well they have done long before the publication of the national data and many would want that provisional data to be included but that would have an impact on all of the benchmarked statistics.

Elsewhere, there is the knotty question of ownership. At the moment, although the contents of the school prospectus are clearly delineated, there is no doubt who owns it. However, if in the future the statistical section was simply downloaded from a government website or the schools information was uploaded, the sense of ownership might be lost or, at best, obfuscated. That might make for a more level playing field but would it reflect the priorities and the character of a school?

Finally, and worryingly, everyone is concerned today about workload. The solution must not place an increased burden on school management or on governors but while this may be an admirable intention, there is a danger that it could lead to the choice of a simple electronic model with minimal supporting information. Few headteachers would believe that they could sum up the ethos of their schools and the priorities for improvement within four sides of paper so, instead, there is a danger of producing a banal set of figures without qualifications or interpretation. The current arrangements for the Annual Governors’ Report and for the School Prospectus state what must be included as a minimum but do not limit the contents otherwise. In the longer term, a change that led to greater standardisation might well fail to reflect the diverse character of schools.