Can anyone explain what the Progress 8 score is?

I know a school who does well by kids it has but 'loses' less able in year 9/10 to local college and this has major positive impact on their progress and attainment 8.
Lots of flaws with this system - favours schools with more able/ advantaged intakes despite arguments to contrary. Rewards A- A* more than E- D etc.
Extra tool to batter schools and teachers with and as usual, advantaged schools with easy intakes benefit.

meglet Personally I would only use P8 as a tiny, tiny part of any decision making process unless one school is -0.5 and the other is +0.5.

What MsJolly said.

So it’s their actual Attainment 8 score minus their predicted (from KS2 Sats) Attainment 8 score.

Positive means they did better than average for the KS2 results they started with.

As MsJolly says, it is a way of measuring progress from y6 SATs to y11 GCSEs.

This is so you can compare two schools and how much value added they give pupils rather than just looking at %5A-C which will be massively impacted by the ability of the children it accepts. (So which is better, the coasting grammar that gets 85%A/A grades, or the comp which only gets 60% A-C, it might well be the comp).

Generally, the more positive a score the better, and the more negative a score the worse. However there are various imperfections (to put it lightly) and the measuring to 2 decimal places is crazy, so don't assume that a school with score 0.28 is any better than one with 0.21.

Marking my place, I've got a week to finalise secondary choices and am having nightmares about it . I can't get my head around the P8 scores at all. The new gcse grades seem to have altered the P8 scores too.

Negative not begative!!!

Basically it's related to SAT scores and baseline tests that secondary schools do...so where children are predicted to get to when they reach GCSEs level.
So it's comparing where they start to where they get across 8 of their best subjects and in order for schools to have a positive impact on children this needs to align or improve. So if you're predicted to get As and you get Bs then that's a begative measure.
Not sure if I've explained well!