What’s behind the increasing attainment gap between independent and state schools?
A higher percentage of GCSE entries were awarded grade 7 or above this year, particularly in independent schools. We look at why this might have happened.
GCSE results 2019: The who, what, where and how of grade 9s
Including some truly remarkable results
Long-term outcomes: How do they differ for pupils who go to grammar schools and pupils who go to independent schools?
Comparing the higher education, employment and earnings outcomes of the pupils who attend these two types of schools.
Long-term outcomes: Do grammar schools make a difference?
Selective schools, and the higher education, employment and earnings outcomes of those who attend them
How much does private tutoring matter for grammar school admissions?
Before the 2017 general election, it seemed like grammar schools were about to make a widespread return to England. Although this didn’t happen after the Tories lost their parliamentary majority, the new Secretary of State for Education has backed plans to allow existing grammar schools to expand. This renewed interest in expanding selective education has [...]
KS4 performance tables 2017: Everything we know about coasting schools and floor standard schools
The first table in this post was updated at 17.42 on 25 January 2018 after we noticed – of all things – that percentages in the table did not add up to 100. We very much regret the error. Key Stage 4 league tables – performance tables, to use their proper name – have been published this [...]
How prevalent is Year 12 drop-out from selective schools?
Following the coverage of St. Olave’s school in The Guardian, I revisited the analysis I did on Year 12 retention to examine the prevalence of drop-out from selective schools. I look at a subset of pupils: those who made it to the end of Year 12 and were entered for at least three AS-Levels in [...]
What does North Yorkshire tell us about how reliable the 11-plus is?
Congratulations! You’ve passed your 11-plus. How confident do you feel that you would have passed if you had sat a slightly different test on a different day of the week? In our recent analysis of the Kent 11-plus we expressed concern that the issue of who passes is incredibly sensitive to slight variation in candidate [...]
Kent 11-plus, part 6: Conclusions
This is part of a series of posts from Datalab on how the 11-plus works in practice in Kent. Find the other posts in the series here. It is worth summarising some of the things that we have observed in the course of this analysis. Relatively small changes to the rules that determine whether a [...]