Once again this year we are running a course for researchers who would like to learn how to use the National Pupil Database. It is a 2-day training course in London held on the 4th and 5th of May, 2016. The course instructors will be Lorraine Dearden, Mike Treadaway, Dave Thomson and I. You can [...]
Last year we said we thought we needed about 2,500 extra language teachers to deliver the manifesto commitment to teach the EBacc to all students at KS4. In 2015, 50% of students in state mainstream schools were entered for a GCSE language, so achieving universal provision is an enormous undertaking. Some of these students can [...]
Last year we reported on how schools serving more affluent pupil communities are likely to achieve much better Progress 8 scores. It isn’t immediately obvious that this should be so, since the Attainment 8 GCSE score for a child is always compared to other children who scored exactly the same Key Stage Two (KS2) fine [...]
At the launch of the Social Market Foundation’s Commission into Educational Inequalities a couple of weeks ago, the observation that regional inequalities had widened since the 1970s garnered a great deal of interest. The analysis released by the Commission was just a starting point and I, alongside the other Commissioners (Rt Hon Nick Clegg MP, [...]
Secondary school performance tables report the attainment of the pupils who are present at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4), some of whom have completed their entire secondary education at the school and others who have joined subsequently. But should the school be judged as equally responsible for the attainment of the child who [...]
Today at Mulberry School for Girls in east London (one of my PGCE placement schools well over a decade ago), headteachers and policy makers are coming together to consider how we can address the gender imbalance in headship in our schools. Not everyone agrees there is a problem that needs to be solved. As Andrew [...]
The school inspectorate, Ofsted, was created in an era where detailed pupil background and attainment data was not collected. The only way to judge whether a school was doing a good job was to visit it. Of course, Ofsted aims to do more than replicate exam performance monitoring. It can report on other dimensions of [...]
Since our launch eight months ago, Education Datalab has completed research on school admissions and selection, teacher careers, pupil premium gaps and individual pupil attainment trajectories. But we have written more about secondary school accountability than any other topic. This is, perhaps, not surprising, given the enormous changes in the qualification and accountability regimes currently [...]
The arguments for and against grammar schools are well rehearsed. Grammar schools provide a good education for those who get to attend - I think the best guess in the literature is that they experience gains in the order of 1 grade in 4 of their best 8 GCSE exams. This isn’t a huge impact, [...]
