School Data Updates

Assessment season is here again. In secondary schools, students are filling exam halls to sit GCSEs and A Levels, their pens and pencils contained in clear cases and phones and smartwatches locked away. Meanwhile, in primary schools, teachers are gearing up to administer the seemingly ever-lengthening list of statutory assessments. In this blog post, we’ll […]

SEND is always a focus, and perhaps now more than ever. Barely a day goes by without the publication of another article, and the news is rarely good. Just look at the pages of SchoolsWeek over the past month: budget cuts, delays in assessment, a shortage of educational psychologists, councils facing bankruptcy, and SENCOs under […]

Many schools are using standardised tests from the likes of NFER, GL and Rising Stars to monitor attainment and progress of pupils, and to predict outcomes; and yet there is lot of confusion about how standardised scores relate to scaled scores. The common misconception is that 100 on a standardised test (e.g. from NFER) is […]

Today saw the publication of the 2023 Primary Accountability Guidance, which details how progress measures are calculated for the 2022/23 year 6 cohort. Unlike last year, when we (finally) saw the key stage 1 baseline transition from levels to new national curriculum assessments, this year sees very little change other than a reconfiguring of the […]

As promised, here’s a link to download a copy of my primary results summary tool. Please download and save before entering any data. Otherwise your results will be there for the next person to see. I’ve added the 2023 KS2 results (% achieving EXS; GDS/High score is not out yet) and will add other national […]

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.” (Dr Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park) There is a scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that has stuck with me for 40 years. An advance party of Golgafrinchams, conned into leaving their own planet by […]

Scene opens in dark and dusty office in the DfE’s data bunker deep within the core of a dormant volcano somewhere around the Pacific rim. A phone rings. and rings. and rings. Eventually it is answered by a man wearing a boiler suit and a hard hat. DfE: “Hello. DfE Data Bunker. How can I […]

I recently read Jonathan Simons’ thought-provoking blog post on Ofsted inspections and school standards in which he explains that the task of identifying underperforming schools now rests solely with Ofsted. There are no other accountability levers, no national threshold measures such as floor standards to add a degree of standardisation to the process and perhaps […]

Paragraph 242 of The School Inspection Handbook states that ‘on inspections of infant, junior, primary and lower-middle schools, inspectors will carry out a deep dive to evaluate how well pupils are taught to read. They will pay particular attention to pupils who are reading below age-related expectations (the lowest 20%) to assess how well the […]

In Education, where vast quantities of assessment data are collected and used for the purposes of accountability, it is inevitable that schools will be placed into categories of performance based on their results. Log in to ASP or any of the other myriad school standards reports and you are likely to see eye-catching red and […]