Progress 8 question

The highest p8 for high prior attainers in your list is at the grammar school. The highest p8 for anyone is middle attainers at the grammar school. This suggests, despite any cap, you can still hope to see high p8s for highly (prior) achieving cohorts at any school.

Imo the best schools are doing well by everyone. Not exactly the same but no one left behind. School c is doing surprisingly well by high attainers but not by anyone else, which would put me off.

At my DDs school its low- 0.59, middle 0.61 high 0.76 average 0.63. So yes, it is possible to be reasonably consistent.

High attainers are those getting 110 SATs average.

I agree its important to look at all the stats though... nonohe piece if data tells the whole story. P8 is just a statistical analysis (which won't be available for the next couple of years as the Y6 data doesn't exist)

I would look at Progress 8 and Attainment 8. Locally most of the difference in attainment is accounted for by the progress score i.e. a higher progress score correlates with a higher attainment score in a fully comprehensive area.

Mid prior attainment at selective schools are likely to have significantly underperformed at primary school.

There is a cap on Progress for high prior attainment. In 2022 that was 0.7 for a student who got full marks at KS2 and straight 9s at GCSE.

All of those schools have reasonable P8 scores based on prior attainment. School B hasn’t added as much value to its higher prior attainers but you don’t have the exact detail, for some kids L7+ will barely add any value but they’ve still got great outcomes. Look at attainment as well.

i could be wrong but if your child is bright and motivated I would hope for a school with bright motivated classmates and look for a poor progress 8 but high final grades.

If a school has a disproportionately high achieving intake then there is less scope for huge amounts of “value add”, so Progress 8 may be limited. You would still want to see a positive (or at least neutral score) for the high achieving cohort though.

Schools that have the highest overall Progress 8 are likely to be those who do a great job of teaching a low to middle achieving intake, so lots of value add in really bringing up their scores.

Personally if looking at Progress 8 I’d decide if my child is lower, middle or high achieving and then look at the scores for that cohort.

To answer your question, I think in theory it should be possible for a comp to have positive value adds for all cohorts, but whether this happens in practice is an another question.