School with 70% pass rate "actually" has 0% - have you seen this?

[roisin]

BBC article here

"In one academy, 70% of pupils got five good GCSEs, but this reduced to zero when equivalents were discounted."

So what they are saying is that EVERY child in that Academy is doing one of these inflated "worth 2, 4, 6" courses, eg COPE; presumably purely to try and manipulate the league tables. But actually NONE of the students are leaving with a handful of decent qualifications?!

I wonder where this school is?

[butterfliesandladybirds]

I think league tables are just a stupid and useless waste of time. I think we should set up league tables of politicians in which we distil various sorts of scores on different measures into a single rating and publish these in all the newspapers.

Let's see whether they still think this is a good idea, then.

An educational researcher recently said that, once all other factors were controlled for, the effect of a school on a child's educational attainment was about 10%. What a lot of parental angst over such a small effect.

[LittenTree]

So are we agreed that 'VA' scores for super selective schools are a bit of a red herring, then?!

I just wanted to weigh in and agree with what banter said earlier- that League table positions, E. Bacc scores, GCSEs, equivalents etc etc are all entirely dependent - and really only have meaning- within the context of where the school is placed geographically, and therefore socially. For all the ranting about how much 'integrity' Gove is showing, and how 'this will ensure all our DCs get a good education', (though what we seem to mean is 'OK, now every child will sit 5 GCSEs: Maths, Eng, MFL + 2 randomly selected humanities, so that's OK, then. Even if they stand precious little chance of passing any of them...)- the reality is that every one of us who has ever glanced at a league table has contributed to the weirdly oddly skewed 'attainment measurement' system we have.

Though I don't condone, I cannot blame schools that have 'played' the game because politics is a game and schools are being judged nationally about how well they play that game. An entire school's output (of all types), ethos, enhancement, commitment to all its pupils and so on can now be summed up in one word, be it 'Satisfactory', 'Outstanding' or whatever.

[BoringSchoolChoiceNickname]

There are some schools which are superselective for only a part of their intake, obviously the sums are more complex for them.

Custard whilst you're obviously right that it's difficult to genuinely add value to such an intake, the VA calculations aren't set up to distinguish between the "top set bright" and the "off the scale" at KS2 level - they don't feed the NFER results into the tables. Hence it's not difficult to apparently add value if you're picking the very top of a group which is simply categorised as "level 5 SATs" for table purposes - and I suspect that's how ouluckyduck's local grammar achieved and otherwise implausible 120 VA.

[Ouluckyduck]

Not sure about the levels, dd who passed well is a very comfortable level 5, but no higher.

[BoringSchoolChoiceNickname]

I'd say that given that the school you're talking about is purely selective then the VA figures, whilst not a bad thing, do not really prove anything, because the measurement of where the children started is too broad to prove anything either way.

[teacherwith2kids]

The VA score on superselectives...could be argued either way.

One way says that children entering superselectives will pretty much all be Level 5 in their SAtS at end KS2, which then means that if they all get a crop of As at GCSE, that is 'expected' progress = average VA.

Another says that actually, in the type of superselective you are talking about, the 'true' level on entry, although reported by primaries as level 5, will actually be Level 6s (DS, who was nowhere near passing for a similar superselective, will have Level 6 in reading and Maths at the end of Year 6 - so those who have passed will in general be higher than him) - and so the progress achieved in the secondary is 'inflated' by a whole level because of the artificially low starting point. Also, at least in my area, a majority of entrants into the superselective grammar are from private primaries (whose raison d'etre is to coach for the grammar test for 7 years). Those entrants possibly have no level at all on entry (would be interesting to know how this is handled). If they are given an 'average' grade of 4b in order to have some entry point on the system, obviously the VA of the superselective will look fantastic!

[Ouluckyduck]

So if this school has an excellent value added score that is good news?

[GrimwigTheHeadEater]

I just read 'lamentable' as lame en table

Our local comp has GCSE A*-C 88% (86% exc. equivs) but only 7% Ebacc.

League tables are just a rough guide. You really need to get results per subject for the schools you're interested in, and then analyse in terms of (a) the intake of the school and (b) the abilities of your own child. Luckily I have a DH who enjoys stats

[BoringSchoolChoiceNickname]

Also it depends whether the Superselective is fully selective or not. If it's taking a mix of catchment and 11+ then any VA will be a mix of results - which you can drill down by looking at the high/medium/low progress-made part of the table. Our local ss has very good "progress made" for its high achiever cohort - which isn't surprising because they were probably a long way above what their raw SATs would suggest. It also does well by its middle ranking cohort - which is probably a mix of good teaching, high aspirations and a socially advantaged demographic. But the bottom cohort's progress is significantly worse, and that drags the overall VA down.

[Quattrocento]

At one stage, I tried hard to measure the value added between the local superselective grammar, and the local selective (but less selective) independent. The value added of the independent was not easy to work out, but you could do some maths, and it was clearly streets ahead of the local superselective.

This was three years ago, when deciding where DD would be going. I checked the VA metric for the local superselective and it is not as high as the local comprehensive. Interesting, I thought.

[Ouluckyduck]

I'm a bit confused now - are youbsaying it is easy for super selectives to get high value added, or that it is impossible? This is definitely a super selective - only takes the 120 highest scorers in the test and has no catchnemnt area, but the best value added score of all the schools in the local authority.

[BoringSchoolChoiceNickname]

We're using the same meaning of super-selective banter, but although I'm not an expert, I think you can't be right about how the value added works. The point about VA is that it is a crude statistical calculation applied to all children nationwide. Hence it can't be more granular than SATs because for most children SATs are all that's available.
So if a school is using its own tests to pick out the top 5%, those tests do not go into the VA calculation - all that's "visible" to the league tables is that the children got level 5 in their SATS, which makes them top 15% or whatever. When the same children go on to get brilliant GCSEs it looks as if the school has added value, but that may not be the case.
I don't know what happens to children who join from the private sector - I think perhaps they're left out of the VA because their starting data isn't available.

[Banter]

In that case I've misunderstood what people mean by superselectives. I've always thought that term is used for the schools that have entrance exams that are designed to select the top 5% from a very wide area as opposed to selective schools that have a small catchment area and aim to select the top 25% (or whatever) from it. I also thought that the entrance exam results were taken as the baseline for selective schools. If they are not, how do the tables treat superselectives that pull largely from the private sector (for which there are no SATs)?

[BoringSchoolChoiceNickname]

Superselectives can easily get high VA because the banding at KS2 is pretty broad and the assessment at KS4 is much more detailed. It may look from the POV of the tables as if they've taken a top-25% cohort and magically transformed them into a top 5% cohort but that's only because the KS2 stats don't enable you to distinguish more precisely (I'm oversimplifying, but there is an element of that).

[Banter]

Re iGCSEs, the ones that have been accredited as International Certificates are included in the stats. As more become accredited, they will be included in future years. www.education.gov.uk/researchandstatistics/statistics/a00201306/dfe-gcse-and-equivalent-results-in-england-201011-revised

[Banter]

stick = still! :o

[Banter]

gettingalifenow - good point - thanks.

Ouluckyduck - sorry, I have now put my specs on! I am stick puzzled by the scenario that leads to a super-selective school that can choose the most able children and still deliver the highest value add. Is it shelling out lots of children with 16 A*s?

[gettingalifenow]

Just bear in mind that there are 'lies, damn lies, and statistics' - both of my kids schools score 0% on the Ebacc too, as they don't do Maths Gcse - they do IGCSE and that can't count.

So you'd have to really look into the equivalents before concluding that the results are as lamentable as they appear

[Ouluckyduck]

Sorry I should have said local authority - this is the UK.

[Banter]

PS I ought to have asked, is it that
a) the superselective system works best in your country (ie in areas that have this system, all schools -superselectives and alternative schools - perform equally effectively across the ability range compared to areas that do not have such a polarised system)?

b) the boost given to the high ability cohorts beats the progression achieved in the other schools?