Ofsted schools dashboard,how accurate a picture is it?Panicking!!

[PolkadotCircus]

That's it really.Our school seems to be bottom for everything in KS 2. Knew things weren't good but

Is it as bad as it looks and what does it actually mean?

You mean bottom quartile in the comparisons with other schools?
Yeah, I didn't really get those categories.
Our local mediocre high school is down as top quartile (?quintile) compared to similar schools & even nationally, it has GCSE pass rates around 50% typically and really it's just mediocre. No worse, no better.

Meanwhile DC local primary school has consistent KS2 results very close to national average, and it's down as bottom quartile compared to "similar" schools. There's no logic to those categorisations, so I kind of ignored 'em.

Anyway, I know of super high achievers out of both schools, kids who got level 6s, or who went onto Oxbridge, etc.

I was looking at the school I work at and I couldn't reconcile our last year's results with what's shown there - not sure what they are comparing it to, but I wouldn't count on its accuracy

I too was wondering about the quartile comparisons with other schools. My dc's primary school had ks2 results where 70% of the children achieved L5 or above, 97% L4 or above, and were ranked in Q3 .

So it seems these comparisons are best ignored

Aren't the national statistics just ordinary statistics/ (And assuming that they're reported accurately what you see is what you get.)

The dodgy ones are the similar schools comparisons which are really

compare this school to a random sample of other schools (and then get confused) results.

I was looking at this last night trying to compare schools in the area we are moving to, to DSs current one.... Also looking at ofsted reports for more - completely useless waste of time was my conclusion.

there's a long thread discussing it here

Looking at my local schools it isn't very helpful.

Our primaries are very small 7-20 Y6, results are horribly cohort dependent and go up and down.

All our schools have spaces and almost everyone drives, so cohorts swing wildly with that years gossip. I know green school had a very good reputation around the time DD went to school and no one liked the red schools head.

Basicly the Dashboard shows which school, better off, willing to drive parents choose 6 years ago.

I agree it is unfair for small schools.

However, I'm wondering if the plan isn't to ultimately have this data tracked over 3 to 5 years - thereby making it clearer to parents whether schools are maintaining standards and mitigating for particularly good or bad cohorts.

For our school the results are quite awful for KS2 (4th quartile across the board & lowest in maths) - and that tallies with the data I have been tracking off the SATs scores over the past 4 years.

I'm afraid our school's performance is declining and when those of us have expressed our doubts or worries we've been fobbed off with SATs scores are unfair to small schools (30 pupils - one form). My hope is that perhaps the governors will take our concerns a bit more seriously - possilby returning something like weekly multiplication practice (ca. 5 - 10 minutes of watching videos (songs), playing games or homework (which could be sums, fill in multipication grids or game ideas to play at home with dice or cards), all of which was recently dropped thanks to removal of homework targets.

I also think this kind of stark cross comparison is useful because the real complaint by several of us is that the targets our school is working to are unambitious (i.e. get them to NC Level 4, no more). Too many of the kids just scrape a NC L4 in KS2 SATs and it is a shame. They all enter bright and excited and full of beans (rated average or above average ability as cohorts on entry to YR in relatively comforatbly middle class area) and by the time they leave, they won't do any homework at all, struggle to read and hate maths - and it shows in the KS2 SATs results and what the local secondaries have to deal with.

I think there are some statistical glitches with this dashboard.

LRGS gets 99% 5ACEM, yet is in 4th quintile against similar schools, 100% English, 3rd quartile; etc.

Surely this can't be correct?

These tables are a good first port of call, but they need health warnings cohort sizes and clear links to the schools full league table entry.

KS1 maths results that go 100%, 70% 100%, look crazy if yo don't know that the cohorts are so small that that is 2 or 3 children.

|with small cohorts especially, you need to look over several years results.and of course schools with less than about 1 or so Y6s don't even get published!

sorry I stand corrected! They publish all results but they seem incongruous.
The leafy village schools who get loads of kids into GS seemed to fare worse than the kids in deprived areas ????

The 'similar schools' are schools that have a similar level of attainment at the previous Key Stage for that cohort. (If you download the pdf version of the report there are notes at the bottom). A junior school's 'similar schools' will be those that have cohorts that entered KS2 with similar levels of attainment at KS1. Secondaries will be grouped by attainment levels at KS2.

So the similar-schools quintiles is just a different way of showing VAM? Does VAM adjust at all for social deprivation / school meals profile of the cohort?

This is the paragraph in the notes:

"Similar schools
The "similar schools" measure groups schools together using their prior attainment score for the cohort. Each school has its own group, which includes the schools that are most similar to the school of interest in terms of their prior attainment score. For the Key Stage 4 cohort, their Key Stage 2 average prior attainment score is used; for the Key Stage 2 cohort, their Key Stage 1 average prior attainment score is used to group the schools. There is no similar school comparison for Key Stage 1 data."

So it doesn't look as though there is any adjustment made for FSM numbers/deprivation levels or anything else, it is purely about progress made. So if a cohort joins KS2 with exceptionally good KS1 results, it will need to score very highly at the end of KS2 to show well in the "comparison with other schools".

I'm not sure when these were first published, but it does feel all of a piece with the recent comments from Ofsted about "coasting schools" etc. I'm feeling cynical!

Yes but our school is coasting.

Looking at those stats ours is on the very bottom for absolutely everything(most of the kids come from a consistently outstanding pre-school)in KS2, no other local school is.Ofsted just plummeted from Outstanding to Satisfactory with progress I think an issue,Sats not great,weak management,low consistency etc.

It is a lovely catchment,strong community,big school etc.

Even pre Ofsted it was obvious they were resting on their previous Ofsted laurels and relying on intake ie kids not pushed,no consistency,no complaints taken seriously,arrogance etc.

I'm pleased this is in black and white(seems to sum up Ofsted)so our pretty inefficient govs know the state of play and the arrogance will surely subside however worried as to what will be the priority to improve the data.

Does it mean those kids on course for 4s or above at KS 2 Sats will just be left high and dry whilst they focus on raising their percentage of those not.Ie kids won't get pushed for 5s or even 6s as resources will go towards raising those not hitting 4?

As you say, it's quite black and white, so will be of use to some schools and not tell the whole story for others. I hope it proves useful for you!

As for improving the data, if the children start KS2 having attained higher than expected at KS1 (so Level 3 or above) then I think they will need to get them to Level 5 or higher to do well in the quintiles graphs, although this depends on the progress made in the schools deemed 'similar' so it's hard to be definitive.