How well do schools’ value added (VA) scores at Key Stage 1 correlate with their value added scores at Key Stage 2? Do schools with high scores on one tend to achieve a high score on the other? Or do schools with low VA scores at KS1 tend to achieve high VA scores at KS2? [...]
Is it proportionate for schools with a good inspection rating to receive inspections the same in length and scope to those received by schools which had exhibited weaknesses in the recent past? That, in short, was the thinking when new, short inspections for schools with good ratings were introduced by Sir Michael Wilshaw in September [...]
Schools Week last week published a handy summary of Ofqual’s release of summer 2017 examination entry statistics. It notes that entries in EBacc subjects have risen whilst entries in other subjects have fallen. This raises the question of whether the EBacc is crowding other subjects out of the curriculum. In defence of the EBacc, Schools [...]
The Conservatives’ manifesto has revised the party’s commitment to require all students to study the English Baccalaureate subjects at Key Stage 4. It now has a more modest proposal that 75% of students should study the EBacc by the end of the next parliament [PDF]. To be considered to have entered the EBacc a child [...]
Towards the end of last month, the Department for Education published ‘shadow’ Attainment 8 data for 2015/16 [PDF]. This shows the impact of moving from the familiar scoring of A*-G grades – one point for grade G, up to eight points for grade A* – to the interim scale that will be used in 2016/17 [...]
Aficionados of DfE Statistical First Releases (SFRs) were shocked to their very core a couple of weeks ago with the revelation that the percentage of 19-year-olds qualified to Level 2 had fallen for the first time since records began. In the real world this equates to young people achieving five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C [...]
At Datalab we write about half a dozen blogposts in a typical month. Some we slave over and others we knock out in a matter of minutes, usually with one eye on the football or Paw Patrol. Being unashamed data wonks, we then pore over Google Analytics to see which of our posts have left [...]
We thought we’d run out of things to say about Progress 8 but a couple of blogposts from Tom Sherrington and Jim Gordon last week made us realise that we hadn’t. Both examine, among other things, how Progress 8 scores vary by pupil and school characteristics. (Progress 8 is the headline value added measure by which [...]
This is one of several blogposts in Datalab’s ‘Who’s left’ series of posts. The full series can be found here. In this post we’re coming back to explore in a little more detail two points made in our previous post: firstly, the enormous variation in leaver rates seen between different secondary schools; and secondly, the [...]
