On 13 October secondary schools will receive Progress 8 data for 2016. They will already have received so-called ‘shadow’ data for 2015, of course, but the 2016 data will be different. It will be a game changer. It will be published in Performance Tables and used to define floor standards. As we have written previously, it [...]
Entries in most EBacc subjects increased... Although there was a small reduction in the number of 16 year olds in the UK in 2016 compared to 2015, entries in most EBacc subjects increased. Entries in core and additional science increased by the greatest margin as schools continue to switch pupils out of the BTEC science [...]
Yesterday's GCSE results showed schools strongly switching students away from non-EBacc subjects as they try to fill up the Progress 8 EBacc slots. Religious Studies GCSE, which was controversially not deemed to be suitable as an EBacc humanity, is one subject bucking this trend with yet another year-on-year increase in entries. However, this is not [...]
Last year we reported on how schools serving more affluent pupil communities are likely to achieve much better Progress 8 scores. It isn’t immediately obvious that this should be so, since the Attainment 8 GCSE score for a child is always compared to other children who scored exactly the same Key Stage Two (KS2) fine [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Late last night the Department for Education published the draft Bill with details of how ‘coasting’ will be defined. Three years’ data, from 2013/14 to 2015/16, will be used. The same indicators used to define floor standards will be used but the bar will be raised. The position of the bar for 2016 is not [...]
Want to help steer the Education and Adoption Bill through Parliament? Fancy having a go at defining a coasting school? Look no further than our handy ‘Choose your own coasting secondary school’ tool, useful for Secretaries of State in need of definition. How to use the tool We give you about 3,000 secondary schools with [...]
Our accountability systems – Ofsted and performance tables – require us to place all schools on a line from the very best to the very worst. Every few years we change how this line is drawn. Every time the line is redrawn, headteachers declare the performance metric to be unfair. There is no magical formula [...]
The Wolf Review of 2011 heralded major changes to the Key Stage 4 Performance Tables this year. Much of the media coverage in the wake of their publication tended to focus on a fall in the headline percentage of pupils achieving 5 or more A*-C grades (or equivalents) including English and mathematics and a rise [...]
