Although previous governments used the machinery of performance tables and school accountability to drive improvements in the education system, the Coalition government of 2010 was the first to use it to influence the qualifications that pupils entered at age 16. But for all the rhetoric about the damaging effects on curriculum offer of the English [...]
How well do schools’ value added (VA) scores at Key Stage 1 correlate with their value added scores at Key Stage 2? Do schools with high scores on one tend to achieve a high score on the other? Or do schools with low VA scores at KS1 tend to achieve high VA scores at KS2? [...]
This is part three in a series of blogposts exploring long-term disadvantage. Other posts in the series can be found here. The previous post touched on the relationship between ethnicity, disadvantage and KS2-to-KS4 progress. It made a simple distinction, with white British pupils in one group and all other minority ethnic pupils in another group. [...]
This is part two in a series of blogposts exploring long-term disadvantage. Other posts in the series can be found here. The first post in this series showed how the attainment and progress of pupils varied according to how often they had been FSM-eligible – with pupils who are FSM-eligible on almost every occasion (90% [...]
This is part one in a series of blogposts exploring long-term disadvantage. Other posts in the series can be found here. Pupil Premium pupils are defined as those claiming free school meals at least once in the previous six years. Given that there are three school census returns each year, the Pupil Premium group varies [...]
A version of this post was first published in Research Intelligence, the British Educational Research Association’s termly magazine. When the PISA 2015 results were released in December last year, Vietnam was one of the countries that stood out as doing remarkably well. (PISA is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s triennial assessment of 15-year-olds [...]
Is it proportionate for schools with a good inspection rating to receive inspections the same in length and scope to those received by schools which had exhibited weaknesses in the recent past? That, in short, was the thinking when new, short inspections for schools with good ratings were introduced by Sir Michael Wilshaw in September [...]
Figures came out recently that showed that the proportion of children eligible for free school meals (FSM) was at its lowest level since 2001 [PDF], when pupil-level information on this was first collected nationally. This is likely to be for a combination of reasons: an economy that has improved since the early 2010s, meaning fewer parents [...]
Last Thursday at the Festival of Education, Sam Sims and I presented new research from our forthcoming book, The Teacher Gap, on the small number of schools that appear to be knowingly running a recruit-burnout-replace staffing model. The talk was written up by Schools Week and you can read the whole story of these teachers [...]
