to not understand school progress 8 scores - any teachers out there?

[brizzledrizzle]

What do these actually mean for the pupils?
Our local school is at 0.23 but others are at -0.03 (-0.21 to -0.15)
Can a teacher out there kindly explain it to me please?

Broadly speaking 0 is what they would expect based on the KS2 (SATS) results of that group of children.

A positive number means that the students did better than would have been expected a negative number means they did less well than would be expected. The further away from zero the number the bigger change from the expected.

What @oddboots said. However the upper and lower confidence interval is important.

If one is above 0 and the other below 0, regardless of the school's P8 score, you can only say it is broadly average.

what oddboots said.

Not a teacher. My understanding:
0.5 means on average half a grade higher than would otherwise be expected, across the 8 subjects.
So expected to get 66666666 and actually gets 66667777.
There is quite a range in accuracy, and some of the ways it is calculated are weighted towards particular types of school I believe.
A few students deciding not to work, or higher than average SEN, etc can have quite an impact I believe.

Yes, Grammar schools and high ability intake schools are very favourably treated with the new GCSEs and the way P8 is calculated. It's not a great proxy for how well students are doing (also not a teacher but this stuff is my bread and butter).

I have been watching the local schools and what is amazing to me is how much the same school can change year on year, one school was well above average in 2016, average in 2017 and well below average in 2018 so over three years not the five most high schools teach. It doesn't feel a reliable way of choosing a school in Y7 but I'm not sure what would be better.

thanks for the explanations