Thought I’d put up a graph to hopefully highlight the difficulty in just using either an attainment measure or a progress measure.
Here, I’m not talking about whether Attainment8 and/or Progress8 are good, but the use of the them. Also, not talking about ONLY using these measures.
It is beneficial to use both the measures in tandem. You hear quite a few people say ‘School X has better results (attainment) than School Y’, but that isn’t the whole picture. Generally, GCSE attainment is directly related to prior attainment. The range of ‘progress’ between schools can be large.
Average A8 is 49.8, average P8 is -0.03, for State-funded schools.
Schools 1 and 2 have the same attainment but significantly different progress.
Schools 3 and 4 have the same progress but significantly different attainment.
Schools 5 and 6 are the choices I have. School 6 has a bit better attainment and significantly better progress. What the underlying data shows is that both schools have a similar cohort making them easy to compare, so School 6 is progressing pupils and School 5 is regressing them (even though the latter’s attainment is ok, the same as the national average).
The data is taken from the Gov website, 2016 Provisional.
1-4 are random schools, but which would you choose - School 4 (hi progress, lo attainment) or School 2 (lo progress, hi attainment).
Other flavours of the measures you may want to take into account (which should be on the site (or at least in the download data) when the full results are published) are:
Progress by gender – girls generally perform better than boys, so a school that closes that gap or reverses it may be good for a DS and not so for a DD (depending on the reason for the difference).
Progress by prior attainment – a school with a P8 score of 0.2, say, may have significantly different values for Low, Mid and High (prior) Attainers, e.g. -0.2, 0.3, 0.1 or 0.3, 0.2, -0.2.
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17 replies
stubiff · 21/10/2016 11:13
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