Headline GCSE stats....

Noble
Hear hear about the two decimal places - if you hover over them to see the confidence margins, its clear that the table could be ordered completely differently within the 95% certainty

I just looked up locally.
Yob Central put 12% of its kids in for the Ebacc subjects and 3% of the cohort passed them.
Which is probably why they still have 400 empty spaces

Any minute now, our local paper will publish its annual "Every school in your area, listed from best to worst!" piece of clickbait. That's the title. It makes me so angry.

I also think that the data isn't well explained or understood. At first glance it can be completely baffling to see that a school with a higher progress 8 score can fall into a lower category (e.g. Average vs Above average) than one with a lower score, depending on the size of the cohort (and therefore the confidence interval). The data is presented in a way that makes it look very precise and scientific but, as noble says, it isn't.

That's so true about the decimal places Nobel. The assessments aren't reliable I know, but if we must have a measure of school performance, it does seem fairer to me to take account of the intake profile in some way. I still prefer progress 8 to an absolute attainment level like 5a*-c.
My local school which I know fails pupils has achieved a well below average score, so no surprises there.

Oh, and that's assuming that the data is valid, that the KS2 scores and GCSE grades are a reliable form of assessment, which every teacher and anyone in education knows isn't true.

Do you know what pisses me off the most about Progress 8? The two decimal places. The idea that it's accurate enough to distinguish between two schools to that level of detail.
It can't even distinguish accurately between the performance of two schools with overlapping confidence intervals, so the idea that they can, with a straight face, publish that school A has a Progress 8 score of 0.05 and that school B has a progress 8 score of 0.07 is ridiculous. Parents will look at that and think school B is slightly better, when the confidence intervals will probably be wide enough that they can't even be compared confidently against a school that has a Progress 8 score of say 0.2.

Yes, and the 'prior attainment' is KS2 SATs scores.

I mean, when the exam boards literally pay representatives to go into schools and talk to them about, quote: "Performance Table Lists - What will count for your school - Are there better options"... what does that say about whom the system is currently set up to serve?

Progress 8 isn't judged against predictions. It's judged against the actual performance of other students with the same prior attainment. It's essentially a residual. It tells you how the school's students compare to those with the same prior attainment in other schools. In a perfect world where every school was equally good every school would have a P8 of 0 (or a number very close to zero).

I see no logic in using a pupil's performance in a pretty basic spelling or maths test - or even comprehension and writing - at 11, to assess what kind of a linguist, scientist, musician, historian or geographer they 'should' be by the age of 16.

Measuring progress makes sense; it's what teachers do all the time. Pretending you can reduce all that data to a single figure that is a)accurate and b) directly comparable with other schools is, in my opinion, unhelpful.

Ultimately, there is no way of presenting the 'league tables', imo, that is anything other than flawed - they should never have been introduced in the first place.

Progress 8 may not be perfect, but it's way better imo than the old 5 a*-c measures. At least every pupil counts (rather than only the border line ones), remarks will be included in the revised figures, there are reasonably good reasons not to include retakes and KS2 while not an ideal baseline is taken by almost everyone (I'm more worried about using KS2 for cross cohort GCSE results comparative outcomes manipulation than I am about using them for within cohort measures like progress8).

I looked at the Colchester grammar schools and while the girls school progress 8 was exceptionally high, the boys was rather low which was curious. Shows at least that the measure isn't completely skewed in favour of selective intakes as I have seen argued, though it may well be easier for selective schools to gain high progess8 scores. Has anyone looked at this?

In Suffolk the 3 Seckford Foundation Free Schools which tend to get a lot of criticism and which had poor early results have all scored very highly this year on progress 8.

I think the remarks this year will make a lot of difference - i think they're due to hit the system in an update in ?January?

It's also not possible to look at the detail at the moment - I always like to look at the progress for different groups of pupils as it tends to be more informative than the overall average.

Order has remained fairly similar in our county but the absolute values of Progress8 have moved around a bit.

I would agree with you multivac.
System is flawed on many levels....

It's a good idea, but fundamentally flawed. A couple of outliers can skew the overall figure dramatically; it's based on KS2 results, which are in themselves flawed - not to mention limited; and it prioritises certain subjects and marginalises others.

Moreover, the current headline figures do not take into account retakes (and therefore best outcomes); nor remarks (and trust me, there have been an eyewatering number of grades adjusted upwards after remarking this year).

Sorry Dizzy that is not quite true because unlike the old measures it looks at progress rather than results. So if a child who entered on the old L2 achieved a 3 in GCSE Maths, that is counted as good progress because it is. Before if it wasn't a C it didn't count. I personally think one of the qualities of a good school is that all pupils matter. So this is a measure that assesses all pupils progress not just th C+ ones.

Headlines and even progress 8 misleading. Seems to favour schools with high ability intakes.
Also favours a school near us which has high ability intake plus 'encourages' lower ability out round year 9- lovely...

Rkay thank you that's very simply put. So a score of -0.01 looks a bit ropey but is actually broadly fine in terms of student progress.
I would imagine, in this case that leafy comps and selective grammars wouldn't necessarily have a high progress score as many students are coming in with high ks2 data but their level 5 and above scores will look very good.

Progress 8 score of 0 means that students do as expected.
It is only based on students that have prior data e.g. Have key stage 2 sats scores

If a school has a progress 8 score of say -1 then students on average at that school achieve 1 grade lower than the expected grade when compared with student of the same ability across the country.

If a school progress 8 score is +0.5 then on average students achieve half a grade better than one would expect when compared to students with similar ability profile.

Does that help?

Just looked at my 3 local secondaries, school 1 is the school that most parents are breaking their necks trying to get in to and its always oversubscribed, school 2(DS's school) is considered pretty OK and school 3 never oversubscribed so has to take all the managed moved DC.
Well to my surprise schools 2 and 3 have come out as average whilst school 1 is below average!.......I suppose you really need to have a few years worth of results to really gauge how a school is doing.

Our sons' school is, apparently, 'well below average' for Progress 8; but as last year, only if you go by 'first attempt' data, rather than 'best outcomes'. The school up the road that makes 100% of its students take the European Computer Driving Licence does rather better....

I cannot stand the league tables, with their false promise of simple, direct comparison. They do so much damage - to schools and to students.

On the plus side, when Ofsted came to call earlier this year, they had no choice but to categorise the school as 'good', despite the league tables. I think it's exceptional...

I am a secondary teacher who worked in state until recently and now I work in a private school where progress 8 is not used as a measurement.
I have primary school age DC so looking at these from a parenting point of view. We have a difficult school allocations system in our city and really there is little choice at secondary level of where you go to school.
The school DD would have to go to if we chose to send her to a state has a progress 8 score of -0.01 - still struggling to understand what this means? Grade 5 in E&M is 49%, with the most popular comprehensive in the city 58%.
This school (the first one) has had a bad reputation in the past so I'm really not sure what these results mean.