How do I assess DfEE performance data?

[whereishome]

Hello there,

I am trying to compare certain senior schools using the DfEE performance stats and wondered what everyone else tends to focus on.

I have a very academic son and so am tending to look at the % of students who get 5+ GCSEs and then at the % of high-achievers who achieve this and also expected results in English and Maths. Is there anything else I should be considering before I discount lots of good schools through ignorance : ))

My DCs school is a true comp
they get around 2/3 of pupils through 5 GCSE inc English and Maths
they got around 33% of Goves "Ebacc" last year
they send around 10% to RG Unis - and around 2% to Oxbridge : through the local 6th form colleges as our country separates GCSEs and A levels

ANY non selective school that can beat that lot is doing rather well
ANY selective school that cannot beat that has questions to answer

BUT statistically, those figures reflect the national population - and then you need to have a good understanding of normal distributions for your area too !

I would look at the figures for percentage A*-A grades which indicates that they are catering for the top ability range and also pushing them. Also look at the stats for 'just GCSEs', ie. excluding 'other' types of qualifications which are well and suited to plenty of children but for a high ability child you wouldn't really want a school that pushes them to do a Btec when they could do a GCSE just to help improve their own figures; I'm sure that for the same reasons you are looking at the actual curriculum - options for all three sciences at GCSE and good language teaching etc.

I dislike the A* / A obsession - for a start the stats will start to drop from the outlier year of 2011 .... when I did my O levels, everything above a C counted for the UCCA form to the 40 available Universities .....

the time will come (soon) when grades are effectively normalised

but yes, the just GCSE criteria matters and (snobbishly based on my DCs comp) I'd like to see Latin offerered to the top kids at every comp - for its use in science and languages primarily

Being blunt - as long as the school sets for each subject and your kid doesn't go off the rails (do not underestimate peer group pressure!), your ds will be one of those getting 5+ A*-C so does it really matter if he is one of 10% or one of 70%?

my own non selective school 90+% A-C inc english and Maths, comprehensive, no selection of any sort (other than catchment area)
don't know ebacc off top of head i'm afraid
approx 50% A-B at A level
We are a outstanding school
no latin here

an outstanding

You need to be wary beause some schools are very good at getting league table positions instead of getting the best results for the children eg pushing the borderline C/D pupils so they get a pass in a GCSE (which looks good for the school) and not pushing the A*/A pupils. Check out the 'total points score'.

See if you can also find the number of exams taken and then divide 'points' by 'number of exams'. You will see if they are going for quantity or quality.

I think that the EBacc is quite a good measure. Schools had no warning of it in advance so there was no possibility of massaging the data. It is amazing how many supposedly good schools dropped MFL when they thought no-one was looking.

senua
they dropped MFL because the government cut funding for it and said it was non core for their government rankings - can you BLAME them ?

talkin - well said! I am for one really sick and tired of defending low Ebacc percentages.....MFL is not compulsory, schools were told Every Child Matters and the curriculum had to reflect that therefore if they didn't want to do a language we shouldn't force it!

op - the main thing I would look at would be the CVA - this measures the value added and how much more than the targets the school have achieved. For example in my area looks good at 95% A-C (inc Eng and Maths) but their CVA is low.....they are selective and in reality should be achieving 100% A-C. Whereas the school I work in is achieving high 70s in the A*-C bracket but we also have our CVA over 1000 which indicates that we push students more than the selective as they are achieving higher than their target

they dropped MFL because the government cut funding for it and said it was non core for their government rankings - can you BLAME them ?

Yes I can! Are they apparatchiks, or educators with professional standards?
Even DD's old school (bog std comp), which I never rated because of its low level of aspiration, encouraged and enabled pupils to take an EBacc-like range of subjects (i.e. get a broad education) , long before they were 'measured' on it.

titchy, it doesn't matter if they are one of 10% or one of 70% as long as they are working to achieve their potential. If their potential is 10A and they achieve just 5Cs then whichever of those schools they are at is failing them. One worry people with very academic dc (such as the OP) tend to have is that as schools are measured on 5A-Cs inc. maths and english, they may be tempted to neglect somewhat dc who will easily achieve that and more.

I think the OP is on the right lines looking at % of students who get 5A-Cs but then using the breakdown of high, medium & low achievers to contextualize it and also looking particularly at how the high achievers perform (since that is the bracket her ds is in). CVA can also be useful here, as long as there are a reasonable number of high achievers at the school (otherwise the CVA is too weighted towards the other brackets) and number of A/A grades if you can find it is also a useful measure (but again this should be contextualised in terms of the percentage of high achievers at the school)

So it doesn't matter if a school has a lower 5A*-C standard due to having large numbers of low achieving children (bringing this figure down) as long as the higher achieving children that are there are also achieving to their ability.