On 13 October secondary schools will receive Progress 8 data for 2016. They will already have received so-called ‘shadow’ data for 2015, of course, but the 2016 data will be different. It will be a game changer. It will be published in Performance Tables and used to define floor standards. As we have written previously, it [...]
Entries in most EBacc subjects increased... Although there was a small reduction in the number of 16 year olds in the UK in 2016 compared to 2015, entries in most EBacc subjects increased. Entries in core and additional science increased by the greatest margin as schools continue to switch pupils out of the BTEC science [...]
There has been some discussion on blogs and twitter in recent days about whether schools should try calculating Progress 8 on results day. Given that it is the measure used to define the floor standard, it is quite understandable that schools will want to know as soon as possible where they lie in relation to [...]
This year’s AS-Level results include the first set of decoupled subjects, which won't count towards English students' final A-Level grades next year. Declines in UK entry numbers in the decoupled subjects range from 11% (business studies) to 33% (art and design). Why not enter for AS-Level? Examination fees cost money, and schools’ post-16 budgets are already stretched from funding reforms which have [...]
One of the most interesting figures in Tuesday’s statistical first release on pupils in state-funded schools was the fall in the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals to the lowest level recorded since the introduction of the School Census in January 2002. Of course, it's well-known that free school meal eligibility is an [...]
Ofqual last week wrote to awarding organisations (AOs), asking them to justify the size, and guided learning hours, of qualifications of theirs which count in Key Stage 4 performance tables. The regulator may wish to go further and consider also how grades in non-GCSE qualifications relate to GCSE grades. GCSE grades awarded by different AOs [...]
Last month, DfE published new guidance for academies wanting to open a new school sixth form. The guidance includes the recommendation that they should have at least 200 pupils and offer 15 A levels (as reported in TES last week). We think over 40% of existing school sixth forms fail to meet these guidelines, for [...]
Answer? Law and astronomy, although there are very few entries each year. The much bigger issue is that GCSEs in modern foreign languages are graded more severely than other subjects. Just before Christmas, Ofqual published a set of very interesting working papers about inter-subject comparability and subject difficulty in GCSEs and A levels. The conclusion [...]
A lot has been written in the search for a credible explanation for the improvement in attainment in London’s schools since the turn of the century. It now seems that London’s schools have disproportionately benefited from improvements to the education system as a whole, with similar pupils and schools elsewhere in England improving by roughly [...]
