SIGNIFICANT changes have been made to this year’s primary school Key Stage Two league tables but Bradford’s overall entrenched problems of poor attainment clearly remain.

The percentage of the district’s ten and 11-year-olds reaching required standards in reading, writing and maths was the joint fifth worst in England and left Bradford with only nine Local Education Authorities below it having attained, in some cases also jointly, even poorer rates.

These results are also the first since a new, tougher KS2 curriculum was introduced two years ago and as such mean that this latest data cannot be compared to previous years.

But controversial as some of those changes might be to sections of the teaching profession, the introduction of the new ‘progress scores’ which measure the ability of each school to raise pupils’ performance over the course of their education could, in future, provide a more reliable indicator of the quality of the teaching they receive and help Bradford’s progress up the league tables.

Of course, many individual schools in our district have far exceeded the national average and their staff and pupils fully deserve our congratulations.

But, as we have repeatedly said before, the fact remains that there are deep-rooted attainment issues at too many others, and these problems need to be urgently addressed to deliver the well-educated and skilled future workforce that this district needs in order to develop and flourish.

There really is no time to waste.