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 [...]
In the past few weeks both CentreForum (in conjunction with our very own Mike Treadaway) and the Social Market Foundation have published reports on education. Both reports discuss gaps in attainment between pupils from different family backgrounds, drawing attention to the importance of education for social mobility. Education is usually seen as an important factor in [...]
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 [...]
David Bowie sang “And every time I thought I'd got it made, It seemed the taste was not so sweet” (Changes, 1971). He could have been thinking about the changes which will happen over the next few years in government accountability systems – scaled scores at Key Stage 2 in 2016 and reformed GCSEs from [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In this project with Peter Urwin and Augusto Cerqua we analyse the returns to FE learning using matched ILR-WPLS administrative data. This programme of investigation identifies good labour market returns to FE learning, and compelling evidence that previous less favourable findings [for instance relating to Level 2 vocational learning] were a result of data limitations, rather than [...]
In this blog, we examine the variation between areas in rates of first degree achievement and further education participation at age 19 or above. Young people who were living in London at age 15, particularly those who were eligible for free school meals, were more likely to go on to achieve a degree than those [...]
