Teachers
Education and Skills
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister (Schools), Education; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills pursuant to the answer of 10 July 2006, Official Report, column 1462W, on teachers, how many statistical first releases published by his Department (a) were found to contain errors following their publication and (b) had corrections published on his Department's website subsequent to their initial publication in each year since 2000.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and 14-19 Learners), Department for Education and Skills; South Dorset, Labour)
The information requested is shown in the following table for the years 2003 to 2006(1).
1 The information is not readily available for errors corrected before July 2003 due to the functionality of the Department's website (information on updates and their nature is only stored from July 2003)
| Errors and Corrections in Statistical First Releases (SFRs) from 2003( 1) to 2006( 2) | |||||||
| Total number of SFRs published | Number of SFRs with errors detected( 3) | Number of errors( 4) | Of which, errors were corrected in: | ||||
| 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | ||||
| 2000 | 59 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2001 | 54 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2002 | 36 | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2003 | 42 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 2004 | 55 | 5 | 6 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2005 | 64 | 6 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 8 |
| 2006(5) | 39 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Total | 349 | 15 | 23 | 0 | 3 | 7 | 13 |
| (1) 2003 figures only include errors corrected from 1 July 2003. (2) 2006 figures only include errors corrected before 31 July 2006. (3) All errors that are detected in Statistical First Releases are corrected and re-published on the Department's Research and Statistics Gateway (4) For the purposes of this question, an error is defined as an occurrence where figures have been updated in a statistical first release due to problems detected with the underlying data or with the methodology. The term 'error' does not include changes to figures that are a normal part of the Department's cycle of checking data with providers (leading to provisional, revised and final figures) (5 )Total SFRs published to the 31 July 2006 | |||||||