We recently submitted evidence to the Education Select Committee, as part of their inquiry into primary assessment. What follows is the text of our submission. A PDF copy of the submission can be found here. The role of statutory assessment in primary schools Assessment plays numerous roles in primary education. Statutory assessment should, as a minimum, ensure [...]
Education Datalab recently contributed evidence to the Education Select Committee's inquiry into primary assessment. Among the points made by Datalab are that: using assessment for curriculum compliance must be done with care; we need a reliable age five baseline assessment; teacher assessment should not be used in statutory assessment; a simpler floor standard would be fairer and [...]
Education Datalab has today submitted its response to the government’s Schools that work for everyone consultation. The green paper consulted on: the identification of those families who are ‘just about managing’; the contribution which independent schools can make to the state sector; conditions that should be met if existing selective schools are to be allowed [...]
One criticism of the current Progress 8 measure is that the points awarded to some qualifications are more (or less) favourable than to others. There is a risk that any inequality in the way different qualifications are valued incentivises schools to pursue those treated more favourably at the expense of working to improve grades awarded [...]
Today, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development releases results from the 2015 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Despite the ‘country rankings’ taking the headlines, there are many other - and often more interesting - findings once you scratch below the surface. In this blogpost, I provide a crash-course in 10 [...]
This morning the Social Mobility Commission published our research examining the choice of courses and institution made by students at age 16. We could see there were differences in the choices made by social background, ethnicity and gender of the student and wanted to measure the extent to which these arose through differences in: GCSE [...]
Since the government’s announcement that it wants to see the return of more widespread selectivity to England’s education system we have written quite extensively about grammar schools and the impact of selectivity. In this post, however, we’re going to step back a little and offer a more descriptive overview of the existing network of selective [...]
Jurgen Klopp, the manager of Liverpool FC, has been in the game of football long enough to know that making predictions about winning the Premier League is unhelpful. In an interview with Goal, his thoughts were measured as usual: “The main thing is that we actually think about ourselves: ‘Yeah, we are quite a good [...]
This post was updated at 8.30 AM on 22 November. An earlier draft of the piece had originally been posted in error. What is the reasoning behind the government’s proposal for more selective schools: greater choice or better schools? Numerous studies have demonstrated that both have flawed foundations, including from the Education Policy Institute [PDF] and ourselves [PDF], [...]
