Why one number is a lie
A blended score tells a head nothing about legal exposure.
Compliance checkers love a single percentage. It looks tidy on a dashboard. For a governing board trying to understand real risk, it is close to useless, because it hides the one distinction that actually matters.
Two very different problems, one misleading average
Take a school that has not published its admission arrangements. That is a breach of a statutory duty with a date attached to it: the arrangements should have been published by 15th March. If a parent complained, or an inspector asked, there is no defence. The document is not there.
Now take a school whose uniform policy is vague about what counts as acceptable summer wear. That is untidy. An inspector might comment on it. It does not put the school in breach of anything.
A blended percentage treats these two findings as the same kind of problem, just weighted a little differently. Average them together and you get one number that moves for both a missing statutory document and a vague sentence about school ties. That number cannot tell a head which of the two needs fixing this afternoon and which can safely wait for the next policy review. It tells them "your score is 78%", which is not a fact about the law, and not a fact about the school's actual risk. It is an artefact of how the average happened to be calculated.
Two buckets, never blended
Statutory - a duty the school is required to meet, and the published document does not meet it. Each finding rests on wording we can quote back, against a source we can point to on GOV.UK.
Quality - not a breach, and not something the school would fail on. But it would invite comment from an inspector, or read badly if quoted back at the school in a difficult conversation.
We count these separately, on every report, and we never add them together or turn them into a percentage. A school with one statutory issue and a school with ten quality issues are not "equally compliant" just because the arithmetic happens to land on the same number.
The test we apply
In plain terms: if an inspector looked at it, could they say we were wrong? If yes, it is statutory; if it is a matter of judgement, it is quality.
It is a simple test, and it is deliberately conservative. If there is genuine room for judgement, we do not call it a breach. We would rather under-claim than tell a school it is in breach of something it is not.
It is also why we keep a calendar of the dates statutory items actually fall due, rather than folding "on time" and "exists" into the same tick. A document that is late against its own statutory deadline is a different fact from a document that does not exist at all, and both are different again from a document that reads badly. Three facts, three different actions, one number cannot hold all three.