So you’ll get your GCSE results on Thursday. They’ll show that you’ve done really well. Have you decided what you’re going to do next? Has your school got a sixth form? Are your grades good enough? Are there any Colleges nearby? What do they offer? Now imagine you come and live with me in South [...]
Over the weekend the Daily Mail reported on plans to open the first new Grammar School in 50 years. The arguments for and against Grammar Schools as agents of educational improvement and social mobility will doubtless be rehearsed with even greater vigour in the coming months. In this blog we look at whether private tuition [...]
Secondary school accountability is changing and by 2016 schools will be primarily judged by their Progress 8 score, rather than the proportion of pupils achieving five or more GCSEs at A*-C, incl. English and maths. Progress 8 isn’t perfect (no rank order of schools serving different communities can be), but this is indeed progress. The [...]
How’s your driving? Below average, pretty normal, or better than most? Research suggests that the majority of our readers have just answered ‘better than most’. They are surely wrong. Only half of drivers can be better than the median. The other half are, by definition, below it. This is an example of what psychologists call [...]
From time to time the use of significance tests for school performance indicators in RAISEonline is called into question. If school cohorts are not independent, random samples then surely we should not be using significance tests that assume independent, random samples right? Well, yes and no. If we want to make causal statements (i.e. that [...]
Ofsted judgements. Floor standards. Coasting schools. Schools are going to be subject to multiple accountability judgements at once. This might be helpful, ensuring no school falls between the cracks. Or it might undermine the credibility of the accountability regime by signalling confusing messages to schools. The interplay between Ofsted judgements and coasting schools is interesting. [...]
Late last night the Department for Education published the draft Bill with details of how ‘coasting’ will be defined. Three years’ data, from 2013/14 to 2015/16, will be used. The same indicators used to define floor standards will be used but the bar will be raised. The position of the bar for 2016 is not [...]
Want to help steer the Education and Adoption Bill through Parliament? Fancy having a go at defining a coasting school? Look no further than our handy ‘Choose your own coasting secondary school’ tool, useful for Secretaries of State in need of definition. How to use the tool We give you about 3,000 secondary schools with [...]
The Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, will likely talk this week about the new requirement for schools to teach all Key Stage 4 pupils the English Baccalaureate subjects of English, maths, science, history or geography and a language. This follows a speech last week by Nick Gibb and is arguably the most significant part [...]
