TWENTY Oxfordshire primary schools have fallen below the Government’s minimum standards, as new figures show the county’s seven-year-olds are still performing below the regional average.

Oxfordshire County Council’s deputy director for young people, Jan Paine, told a council committee the number of primaries falling below national “floor” targets had risen from 13 last year.

The Department for Education demands 60 per cent of 11-year-olds reach Level Four in both English and maths, unless pupils make better-than-average progress given a poor starting point.

At that level, pupils are expected to begin to use grammatically complex sentences and use full stops, capital letters and question marks in English, know their times tables up to 10x10, and be able to draw simple line graphs in maths. Twenty have failed to reach that standard, although the figures will not be verified or the schools named until later this year.

At other “coasting” schools, which beat the 60 per cent target, pupils were not making as much progress as they should, she added.

Education data expert Professor John Howson told the Oxford Mail: “It is tragic for the children at those schools, and totally unacceptable.

“If this was a business, it would have gone bankrupt by now because so long has been spent talking about it.”

This week, latest Key Stage One results also showed Oxfordshire’s seven-year-olds were still bottom placed for reading, writing and maths compared to the 10 “statistical neighbour” local authorities with similar demographics.

In Oxfordshire, 86 per cent of seven-year-olds reached Level Two in reading, 80 per cent in writing and 90 per cent in maths.

That marked a single percentage point increase in writing and maths, and two percentage points up in reading from last year, and stayed below the South East average.

Professor Howson warned the figures masked poorer results in Oxford.

Council officers are drawing up an improvement plan for the county’s primaries.

They are to outline new triggers for local authority intervention before schools drop below floor standards or fail Ofsted inspections.

But members of the children’s Services select committee warned on Tuesday that councils had less power and fewer resources to force schools to change.

Councillor Nicholas Turner, a committee member, said: “I know two or three schools where the school is not performing and there are issues there, but heads just carry on, everything goes along and nothing really is done.

“It seems that fundamentally, it ain’t working and there ain’t a lot we can do to fix it.”

But the county councillor responsible for school improvement, Melinda Tilley, said: “Our remit is to try to ensure every child is offered a good education in Oxfordshire.

“We have the resources to do that but we are going to have to prioritise very carefully.

“What we know we need to do is get into schools earlier.

“We need to set new triggers for going in and making suggestions, offering help, supporting and challenging schools.”