The new government consultation on ‘ordinary working families’ is being used as the latest piece of arsenal to shore up support for grammar schools among the general public (the majority of whose children will, of course, get to attend secondary moderns). From it they conclude that the children of ordinary working families stand a good [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
There’s long been interest in socio-economic inequalities in educational achievement in England. Typically, most research in this area focuses on differences in average scores. Less attention has been paid to young people at the extremes of the distribution – for instance, how achievement varies between the most able pupils from advantaged and disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. [...]
Two blogposts from the Headteachers’ Roundtable concerning funding and pupils with statements of special educational needs (SEN) or education, health and care plans (EHCP) caught our eye recently. The first, by Jarlath O’Brien, highlighted the projected 15% increase in the number of pupils requiring a place in a special school over the next ten years [...]
Value added data, calculated by a number of different methods over the years, has been a feature of school performance tables since 2003. In principle, the idea is sound. Comparisons of schools’ raw attainment measures often say more about schools’ intakes than they do about the quality of teaching and learning. So if the state [...]
Education Datalab has today submitted its response to the government’s Schools that work for everyone consultation. The green paper consulted on: the identification of those families who are ‘just about managing’; the contribution which independent schools can make to the state sector; conditions that should be met if existing selective schools are to be allowed [...]
