THE Torfaen education department placed in "special measures" two years ago has made significant progress on its recovery journey, a new report has revealed.

Torfaen became the sixth under-performing Local Education Authority in Wales to be recommended for special measures in February 2013.

Education inspectorate Estyn found that the LEA was not intervening effectively to prevent schools’ under performance.

Estyn also concluded that raising standards in secondary schools particularly at Key Stage 4 was not being addressed and the LEA had failed to improve the quality and consistency of the evaluation of its services.

But Torfaen education chiefs believe they have by and large met five recommendations set out by Estyn.

A Torfaen council spokesman said: "The council and its partners are continuing to focus where Estyn identified improvement is needed and has made progress against Estyn’s recommendations.

"A Children and Young People Improvement Board has been established to drive improvement and self-evaluation with a greater degree of scrutiny, governor and head teacher involvement.

"We will continue to work closely with key stakeholders and the Welsh Government appointed recovery board and feel well placed to continue making progress in line with the joint improvement plan."

The Estyn recommendations called on Torfaen LEA to raise standards in secondary schools and take action to reduce the number of so-called "Neets" – people not in education, employment or training.

Other recommendations called for Torfaen to improve the quality and consistency of the evaluation of its services, as well as improve performance management and partnership arrangements to drive up standards.

In a progress report to be discussed today [April 15], Torfaen council interim head of education service Dermot McChrystal stated: "We have collectively made significant progress against all of the recommendations having largely addressed one, four and five and we have fully addressed two and three at the time of writing.

"We believe we are well placed to make further progress in the coming months and expect to see further improvements over the coming months.

"We are now in the process of updating our full self-evaluation report and which we will update again in late August once we have the provisional GCSE results in time for the next Estyn monitoring visit in the late autumn."

In the progress report, the council said that Key Stage 4 performance had improved year on year since 2011.

The LEA also believes that issues around performance management and partnership arrangements have largely been addressed.

The report also stated that meetings with the recovery board had acted as a "critical friend" on their "recovery journey" and tested their self evaluation processes.

In addition, the proportion of Neets fell from 6.7 per cent in 2011 to 2.5 per cent in 2013 with a further drop expected this year, the report showed.

The progress report is to be circulated to Torfaen council's learning overview and scrutiny committee today.