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, [...]
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 [...]
Reformed GCSEs in English and mathematics will be introduced in 2017. Noticeboards in staff rooms across the country are adorned in postcards from Ofqual summarising the changes. But although the grading structure will change, we are led to believe that broadly similar proportions of pupils will achieve grade 4 and above as currently achieve grade [...]
Schools prepare students for the qualifications that they believe will help them get on in life, within the constraints of a National Curriculum set by politicians. But they do so with one eye on the accountability measures by which the school itself will be judged. No government has ever been as active as the Coalition [...]
For the last three weeks myself and twelve post-graduates who are studying Creative Writing around the UK have been immersing ourselves in dragons, bears, vampires and ghosts. No, we haven’t been overdosing on Netflix, we have been judging the creative writing of 11 year olds in what we think is the largest experiment ever of [...]
Since our launch eight months ago, Education Datalab has completed research on school admissions and selection, teacher careers, pupil premium gaps and individual pupil attainment trajectories. But we have written more about secondary school accountability than any other topic. This is, perhaps, not surprising, given the enormous changes in the qualification and accountability regimes currently [...]
So A-level General Studies will be no longer be available after 2016. As Ofqual have been reforming A-levels so-called “soft” subjects such as home economics and now General Studies have been dropped. But are some current A-levels really easier or harder than others? In this blogpost, we look at national attainment in 2014 in five [...]
Secondary schools can now download the marks achieved by each of their new year 7 pupils in every question from the 2015 Key Stage 2 tests. Even better, this data can be imported into RAISEonline so that analysis of test performance can be undertaken for a year group, class or individual pupil broken down by [...]
With Finland giving up on handwriting at school it is perhaps only a matter of time before we all follow. Before we down our pens with the Finns, however, should we consider whether pupils actually write as well on a word processor as they do with pen and paper? We ran a small study at [...]
