"I feel they don't really indicate KS1 success. Given that I haven't made a long-term plan yet, should their importance be somewhat secondary in my considerations? What do you think?"
You are quite right. However, your DD will be moving on to KS2 a year from now when she starts in Year 3 (I presume in the OP you meant she is starting Year 2 this September).
If you are only planning on staying wherever you move to for 6 months or a year then it doesn't really matter which school she goes to. But if you're planning on staying in one place for two or three years at least then the KS2 results do become relevant.
"Which do you think is more important, these percentages or the progress results?"
It's a bit of both. This is going to be another long post with lots of numbers in it. The links to all the information are given at the bottom.
Things like the overall % that meet expected standard are based on two things. Firstly how academic the children are anyway and, secondly, how good the teaching is.
You could have one school with a lot of high achievers but the teaching is just average and they will still outperform another school which only has a small number of high achievers but very good teaching.
This is the case with Hampton Hargate and Hampton Vale.
When pupils start Year 3 they are classified as either Low, Medium or High Attainers based on their KS1 results.
If you dig into the information available you will see that it is split up so that you can look at these groups separately.
It turns out that, in the latest results, Hargate had 41% High attainers, 42% Medium Attainers and only 17% Low Attainers.
In contrast, it was reversed at Vale. They only had 18% High Attainers, 49% Medium Attainers and 33% Low Attainers.
Overall, Hargate did have a higher % of pupils meeting the expected standard but this was only because they had a lot more High Attainers than Vale.
If you look at the figures for each group separately then Vale outperforms Hargate
% of pupils meeting the expected standard
School Hargate Vale
High.......100%......100%
Med........76%........81%
Low.........27%........21%
So Vale did just as well among the High, did better with the Medium. The figure for Low Attainers was not as good but when you look at the Progress scores for Low Attainers it looks like they were particularly low.
So, although Vale did well with both High and Medium the overall figure came out lower because they don't have as many High attainers as Hargate does.
It's a similar matter with % of pupils achieving at a higher standard. If you break the figures down by prior attainment you get this:
% of pupils achieving at a higher standard
School Hargate Vale
High.......38%......38%
Med........0%........5%
Low.........0%........0%
So, Vale does just as well with High and also gets some of their Medium at the higher standard as well which Hargate does not.
But, since there are more High Attainers at Hargate the overall figure for the school is higher.
You can also look at things like the difference between boys and girls. At Vale it's pretty equal but at Hargate there is a big difference between the sexes where 21% of girls were at a higher standard but only 12% of the boys.
Another thing this is useful for is for looking at the type of pupils going into the school at Year 3. One of the other schools I mentioned above literally had only one pupil that was a High Attainer and the rest were split 50/50 Medium and Low.
They do a fantastic job and even get 15% of their Medium Attainers to the higher standard. They are clearly very experienced at getting Medium and Low Attainers to do well, but maybe the teachers aren't so used to teaching High Attainers
(I have no idea about this and am not implying anything negative at all about those teachers as they certainly do get impressive results).
These are the links with all the figures.
https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/132763/hampton-hargate-primary-school/primary/results-by-pupil-characteristics?accordionstate=1|3
https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/146753/hampton-vale-primary-academy/primary/results-by-pupil-characteristics?accordionstate=1|3
You can find the same information for all primary schools by searching here:
https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/find-a-school-in-england