Progress 8 is the value added measure by which secondary schools are being judged, starting from the last academic year. At Datalab we’re broadly supportive of it as a measure. But no measure of school performance is perfect, and P8 is no exception. It doesn’t account for pupil background, and so favours schools with high percentages [...]
In the days of five good GCSE passes all students were equal: each child would contribute a one or a zero to the school’s pass rate, though of course it was easier for a school to get a pass for some students than for others. Under Progress 8, the half a grade positive progress made by 27 [...]
This morning the government published multi-academy trust (MAT) league tables, building on an approach it trialled last year. At a headline level, two thirds of MATs had Progress 8 scores that were below average across the secondary schools which they run [PDF]. But what does the underlying data tell us? In this analysis we’re looking at [...]
This week, 319 secondary schools have been told that they are coasting and so will become eligible for intervention. This includes a staggeringly high 22.6% of schools in the east Midlands. For those deemed to have insufficient capacity to bring about improvement this could be the start of a long road to forced academisation. And [...]
In last week’s blogpost we noted that the pay of senior leaders in secondary schools appears to vary systematically according to their subject background. Here we report senior leadership pay in 2010 separately for headteachers, deputies and assistant heads, based on analysis of the School Workforce Census, and look at how it is associated with [...]
Last year the world of educational leadership research was rocked by a study, summarised in two Harvard Business Review articles (here and here), that introduced to the world the idea of ‘Surgeon’ and ‘Architect’ headteachers, among other types. The findings, if more generally true, would radically re-shape the advice we should give governing bodies about [...]
