Every year there are high achievers at primary school, pupils scoring in the top 10% nationally in their Key Stage 2 (KS2) tests, yet who five years later receive a set of GCSE results that place them outside the top 25% of pupils. There are about 7,000 such pupils each year, 15% of all those [...]
Would you like the use the National Pupil Database for your research? Lorraine Dearden, Mike Treadaway, Dave Thomson and I are running our annual 3-day NPD training course this year in London from Monday 3rd August-Wednesday 5th August. You can find out more and sign up for a place here: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/training/show.php?article=5810. It is [...]
A blog I wrote last week, on the “UKIP voters of tomorrow”, was very popular. In it, I explored the relationship between UKIP vote share in the 2015 General Election and constituency average GCSE performance between 2011 and 2014. There seemed to be a negative relationship between the two measures – constituencies with higher UKIP [...]
Today the Sutton Trust has published Missing Talent, a research brief we wrote on the 7,000 pupils who score in the top 10% nationally in their KS2 tests, yet who five years later receive a set of GCSE results that places them outside the top 25%. The findings show that boys, particularly those from disadvantaged [...]
When MPs quote education statistics, I’m always curious where they got them from and whether they are accurate. Last week, Labour leadership contender Liz Kendall made a speech in Leicester where she mentioned that in Leicester West, ‘children start school on average 15 months behind where they should be in terms of their development’. We [...]
Our accountability systems – Ofsted and performance tables – require us to place all schools on a line from the very best to the very worst. Every few years we change how this line is drawn. Every time the line is redrawn, headteachers declare the performance metric to be unfair. There is no magical formula [...]
There is a small community of people with both experience of our schools and the skills to analyse large scale datasets. We would love to make this community bigger. This summer (starting 3rd August) we are hosting paid interns who have experience of teaching or working with schools to learn how to use the large-scale [...]
Eligibility for free school meals (FSM) has traditionally been used in education research as a proxy for poverty. It has its limitations of course: not all those who may be eligible choose to claim for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, differences in attainment between those known to be eligible and other pupils are stark. As [...]
In a previous blog, we noted that Grammar schools tended to achieve above average Progress 8 scores based on 2014 data. At first glance, this is a worrying finding. Progress 8 is supposed to offer a fairer basis for comparing schools than measures of raw attainment. Moreover, this effect is not limited to Grammar Schools. [...]
