Ofsted reports

[balmywildrose]

Can anyone explain to me how the "value added" stat is calculated in the Ofsted reports. I understand that it should be telling me how the school improves my childs performance but what does it really mean and is it a reliable stat that should guide school choice??

Our data manager told us ages ago that over 1000 means the school has done well at improving their pupils' performance over KS3-4, IIRC.

As a secondary teacher, it wouldn't be a factor in my choice of school. I'd look more at their A*-C including Maths and English before I looked at value added.

It's a measure of how much higher (or lower) the grades the pupils get at this school compared to the grades that comparible students get across the nation, based on what they got at KS2.

6 points is a GCSE grade. If on average every student got the grades you would expect at GCSE the school gets 1000.

1006 means that every student on average got one grade higher in one GCSE than you would expect.

994 means that every student on average got one grade lower in one GCSE than you would expect.

1003 means one in every two students got one grade higher in one GCSE etc.

I'm not sure how the expected grades are calculated any more, it used to depend on the type of students in the school (contextual value added) but the contextual bit got binned.

it should be telling me how the school improves my child's performance

We get slightly more nuanced data these days, in addition to the school-wide VA. If you go here you can see how well the school does for low, middle and high attainers so you can see which statistic is relevant for your DC.
You can also go to the Ofsted website and look up the Data Dashboard which shows how well the school is doing compared to others with similar intake.