Who’s left: The main findings

This is one of several blogposts in Datalab's 'Who's left' series of posts. The full series can be found here. Today we are publishing the findings of a major piece of work we have carried out looking at pupil moves and the impact on secondary school results. Our investigation into the issue and the children [...]

By |2021-02-17T18:47:54+00:0031st January 2017|School accountability|

Another attempt at a qualification-neutral Progress 8 measure

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 [...]

By |2018-09-27T17:48:27+01:0024th January 2017|School accountability|

Outliers in Progress 8

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 [...]

By |2019-07-09T14:30:21+01:0020th January 2017|School accountability|

Multi-academy trust league tables: What can we learn from the data?

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 [...]

By |2017-10-23T13:10:35+01:0019th January 2017|Exams and assessment, School accountability, Structures|

KS4 performance tables 2016: When coasting feels like paddling hard to keep your head above water

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 [...]

Exploring subject background differences in senior leadership pay

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 [...]

By |2017-10-23T13:10:16+01:0018th January 2017|School improvement, Teachers|

No need to recruit headteachers with particular subject backgrounds

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 [...]

By |2018-09-27T17:51:19+01:0013th January 2017|School improvement, Teachers|

KS2 performance tables 2016: Primary schools in the North East are pulling away from the pack

A decade ago, the proportion of 11-year-olds reaching expected standards did not vary much across the regions - except for a little place with an unfixable education system called Inner London. The lines in blue on the chart below show that most regions had just over 70% of pupils meeting the expected standard at that [...]

By |2016-12-15T13:08:34+00:0015th December 2016|Exams and assessment, School accountability|
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