League tables- bullshit?

If progress 8 was about kids leaving school with necessary life skills, there wouldn't be an Ebacc bucket. It's about kids leaving school with approved, academic qualifications.

"The Telegraph list is of schools THAT HAVE SENT THEIR INFO TO THE TELEGRAPH"

Talkin nails it as usual. What is of slight interest is those schools that decide not to send their info in. I can think of at least two not on that table that would be top. They do have it on their website so they aren't so shy, it's just advertising dressed up as lazy journalism. Another won't publish at all until all the "appeals" are done.

It almost made sense until that point. The way it was supposed to work out was that mathematically it would be better sit fewer GCSEs at higher grades than fill all 8 spaces and get low grades. With Eng and maths being double weighted it would benefit those that took fewer options and spent more time focusing on the core subjects (assuming you can find enough maths teachers and make the timetable work). Then they decided you needed an extra qualification so you lose the extra curriculum time you free up.

Thank you Talkin! You said what I was going to say.
The school I work in decided not to submit this year, as after all the changes we didn't think it would be a meaningful comparison.

Turns out, on publication, we'd have been in the top 30. The school does well with its intake, but it's not in the top 30 schools in the whole of England!

Gnome what's the initials of your dcs school, can I ask? All sounds very familiar

The Telegraph list is of schools THAT HAVE SENT THEIR INFO TO THE TELEGRAPH
it is NOT the validated League table
ignore it unless it has all 2,600 GCSE schools in it

That's a good point, Rafals. It's a real shame the joint lit/language qualification has been dropped, imo.

I'm sure there's a MNer whose DD ended up doing something stupid like 15 GCSE equivalents over years 9-11. Including some things she did the BTEC for in yr 9 and the GCSE for in yrs 10 and 11. I'm not sure that even counts in the league tables. It's a strategy for pulling in the right sort of parents on open days.

Progress and attainment 8 should be better. Would be better still if English could double count without you having to take both Lit and Lang. I don't see any reason why that has to be the case if what you are trying to encourage is children leaving school with the necessary life skills.

Everyone would be so much better off if they abolished them.
I would look at them but not use them to choose a school.

I think the Progress 8 measure (and attainment 8) is an improvement on both extremes of ebacc for all vs making or letting academically able kids do loads of BTecs to game the system.

Progress and Attainment 8 encourages students to take some academically challenging subjects including languages, humanities and sciences but allows them to play to their strengths (particular example being that languages are very difficult for some students and had caused an imbalance of workload). The rest of the spaces in the 'bucket' can be taken up with arts and humanities. I think it's good.

I like elements of the EBACC, Bertrand. Like many things the current govt brought in, it probably could have been better if it had been thought through carefully.

Given they raised the school leaving age, if they had wanted to they could have done a complete restructuring of the secondary curriculum to create a broad and balanced curriculum if that was their aim.

I read the article minifingerz, far too close to what has happened at DCs' school.

Sutton Trust on what's actually needed to really improve a school is far more prosaic - give feedback, accurately, quickly, every time.

I must be the only person in the world who really likes the EBacc........

Possibly the flip side to that EBACC argument is that part of the reason it was brought in was to prevent headteachers that only cared about the league tables from insisting pupils only did BTECs in order to bolster their results. There were almost certainly better ways of doing it though.

I think some of those schools on the Telegraph list could only be described as 'comprehensive' in the loosest sense of the word.

howtoimproveaschool

Interesting

There are local tables in some of the papers for 2016. I hate the things. I'd probably pay attention to a properly explained valued-added score that actually tells you something about the job done by the school rather than the quality of the intake. The two lists I hate most are (a) the % of 5A*-C including English and Maths (b) % EBAC. My problem with (a) is that it can fluctuate wildly depending on whether the kids doing badly in English are the same or different to those doing badly in maths. So you could have a school where e.g. 70% get C or better in maths, 70% C or better in English, and let's say everybody gets at least 3 other C+ grades. The league table measure could be anywhere from 40% (two different sets of kids weak in E&M) to 70% (exactly the same kids weak in E&M). So a school could claim a massive improvement where there was none at all. All the schools doing iGCSEs continue to be misrepresented, usually as zero. I could not care less about EBAC. Just tells you if the head is more interested in league tables than giving kids the chance to study subjects that suit them. And none of these things have any normalization based on the volatility you'd expect from the finite and variable cohort size in each school. It's endless statistical charlatanism and almost devoid of real information.

What a surprise that most of those 182 schools have excellent results!

www.google.co.uk/amp/www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/08/26/gcse-results-2016-state-school-results/amp/?client=safari

182 secondaries submitted their results

Chicky these tables are based on about 150 schools out of the 3000+ so not really an indication. Many schools will be in the remark process etc so it's the table in January that has the accuracy.

My Ds school have made a massive post with the words RAISING STANDARDS in it about their amazing results. They were the same as last year and admittedly are just above national average.

What they don't post about is how they do that. Imo raising standards is not getting rid of Sen pupils and struggling pupils through managed moves and covering up knife crime.

If they kept the cohort they got - AN or not they would t get their amazing results. Instead they focus on budgets and results and happily fail the pupils that will potentially pull those down rather than meet them.

State school 2016 league tables are out now. Can't link on my phone, but if you google you will see the telegraph has a list up now

I asked "private or state" because the state league tables certainly include the make up of the cohort- and "expected progress"

January is when the league tables are published correctly. Schools are now listed by progress 8 so highly likely those pesky white working class schools will be at the top ...

Totally agree OP, however it was nice to see my dd school in top 100 when her siblings schools were in bottom 100.

It really doesn't make much difference, I agree.

Misrepresentation will take place. In the year that my DC's school achieved the dubious honour of being the second worst school in Britain the Head characterised the events which lead to this as a minor admin error anyone could have made. Rather than the monumental failure of management that it was part of.

Manipulation will also take place but the extent to which it can take place is limited.