Last week, we heard a lot from the government about their interest in children from ‘ordinary working families’. (For our initial take on the topic, see here and here.) In its new consultation document, the Department for Education has provided information on the GCSE grades and progress of these children – defined as those not [...]
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 [...]
The Department for Education has published a consultation document on family incomes, pupil attainment and school attended that will either fascinate (if you are a data cruncher) or terrify you (if you are a privacy campaigner). For the first time, the records of pupils sitting in the National Pupil Database have been matched to parental [...]
This is part two in a series of posts exploring trends in attainment over time by month of birth. Other posts in the series can be found here. In the first part in this series we looked at how attainment at age seven – Key Stage 1 – varied with pupils’ month of birth. Overall, [...]
So, you are in Year 9 and it’s time to pick your options. (We'll leave aside whether funding constraints leave you with many options). Which science route are you going to take? Triple science or combined science? Will your GCSE grades be roughly the same whichever route you opt for? In this blogpost we look [...]
This is part one in a series of posts exploring trends in attainment over time by month of birth. Other posts in the series can be found here. Dave Thomson’s recent blogpost about how attainment varies by month of birth reminded me of one of the reasons I first got interested in looking at the impact [...]
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 [...]
New analysis This post was published in 2017. We've subsequently looked at the equivalence of A-Levels and reformed BTECs. Read our updated analysis here. * Updated 3rd April 2017 following helpful feedback from UCAS* Last week, the Higher Education Policy Institute published a report on BTECs and university admissions [PDF]. It recognised that [...]
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 [...]
