Headline GCSE stats....

[BertrandRussell]

...any other education nerds looking at them? How did your school do? I don't think i realised that, despite everyone agreeing that a 4 was the new C, it would be a 5 for performance measures. Which is a bit shit for schools like ours.

Headlines and even progress 8 misleading. Seems to favour schools with high ability intakes.
Also favours a school near us which has high ability intake plus 'encourages' lower ability out round year 9- lovely...

Sorry Dizzy that is not quite true because unlike the old measures it looks at progress rather than results. So if a child who entered on the old L2 achieved a 3 in GCSE Maths, that is counted as good progress because it is. Before if it wasn't a C it didn't count. I personally think one of the qualities of a good school is that all pupils matter. So this is a measure that assesses all pupils progress not just th C+ ones.

It's a good idea, but fundamentally flawed. A couple of outliers can skew the overall figure dramatically; it's based on KS2 results, which are in themselves flawed - not to mention limited; and it prioritises certain subjects and marginalises others.

Moreover, the current headline figures do not take into account retakes (and therefore best outcomes); nor remarks (and trust me, there have been an eyewatering number of grades adjusted upwards after remarking this year).

I would agree with you multivac.
System is flawed on many levels....

I think the remarks this year will make a lot of difference - i think they're due to hit the system in an update in ?January?

It's also not possible to look at the detail at the moment - I always like to look at the progress for different groups of pupils as it tends to be more informative than the overall average.

Order has remained fairly similar in our county but the absolute values of Progress8 have moved around a bit.

Progress 8 may not be perfect, but it's way better imo than the old 5 a*-c measures. At least every pupil counts (rather than only the border line ones), remarks will be included in the revised figures, there are reasonably good reasons not to include retakes and KS2 while not an ideal baseline is taken by almost everyone (I'm more worried about using KS2 for cross cohort GCSE results comparative outcomes manipulation than I am about using them for within cohort measures like progress8).

I looked at the Colchester grammar schools and while the girls school progress 8 was exceptionally high, the boys was rather low which was curious. Shows at least that the measure isn't completely skewed in favour of selective intakes as I have seen argued, though it may well be easier for selective schools to gain high progess8 scores. Has anyone looked at this?

In Suffolk the 3 Seckford Foundation Free Schools which tend to get a lot of criticism and which had poor early results have all scored very highly this year on progress 8.

I see no logic in using a pupil's performance in a pretty basic spelling or maths test - or even comprehension and writing - at 11, to assess what kind of a linguist, scientist, musician, historian or geographer they 'should' be by the age of 16.

Measuring progress makes sense; it's what teachers do all the time. Pretending you can reduce all that data to a single figure that is a)accurate and b) directly comparable with other schools is, in my opinion, unhelpful.

Ultimately, there is no way of presenting the 'league tables', imo, that is anything other than flawed - they should never have been introduced in the first place.

Progress 8 isn't judged against predictions. It's judged against the actual performance of other students with the same prior attainment. It's essentially a residual. It tells you how the school's students compare to those with the same prior attainment in other schools. In a perfect world where every school was equally good every school would have a P8 of 0 (or a number very close to zero).

I mean, when the exam boards literally pay representatives to go into schools and talk to them about, quote: "Performance Table Lists - What will count for your school - Are there better options"... what does that say about whom the system is currently set up to serve?

Yes, and the 'prior attainment' is KS2 SATs scores.

Do you know what pisses me off the most about Progress 8? The two decimal places. The idea that it's accurate enough to distinguish between two schools to that level of detail.
It can't even distinguish accurately between the performance of two schools with overlapping confidence intervals, so the idea that they can, with a straight face, publish that school A has a Progress 8 score of 0.05 and that school B has a progress 8 score of 0.07 is ridiculous. Parents will look at that and think school B is slightly better, when the confidence intervals will probably be wide enough that they can't even be compared confidently against a school that has a Progress 8 score of say 0.2.

Oh, and that's assuming that the data is valid, that the KS2 scores and GCSE grades are a reliable form of assessment, which every teacher and anyone in education knows isn't true.

That's so true about the decimal places Nobel. The assessments aren't reliable I know, but if we must have a measure of school performance, it does seem fairer to me to take account of the intake profile in some way. I still prefer progress 8 to an absolute attainment level like 5a*-c.
My local school which I know fails pupils has achieved a well below average score, so no surprises there.

I also think that the data isn't well explained or understood. At first glance it can be completely baffling to see that a school with a higher progress 8 score can fall into a lower category (e.g. Average vs Above average) than one with a lower score, depending on the size of the cohort (and therefore the confidence interval). The data is presented in a way that makes it look very precise and scientific but, as noble says, it isn't.

Any minute now, our local paper will publish its annual "Every school in your area, listed from best to worst!" piece of clickbait. That's the title. It makes me so angry.

I just looked up locally.
Yob Central put 12% of its kids in for the Ebacc subjects and 3% of the cohort passed them.
Which is probably why they still have 400 empty spaces

Noble
Hear hear about the two decimal places - if you hover over them to see the confidence margins, its clear that the table could be ordered completely differently within the 95% certainty

I don't understand why they are reporting the % reaching 5 - as others have said I though that 4 was the equivalent to a GCSE grade C. I just looked at my son's school, which last year got 55% on the % grade C in English and Maths (this reflects its intake) - this year the headline stat that gets reported is half that (whereas the % reaching 4 is about the same). How totally demoralising for the schools - I'm sure there are lots of parents who will take one look at the % pass that gets promoted most heavily and think bloody hell, not sending my child there (especially if they then compare it to the % grade C from last year). Mind you, I guess all schools will have to deal with this.
Frustrating...

PS bang on about the two decimal places. Talk about spurious accuracy.

Yes, the 2 decimal places gets me every time too. Why do they pretend they are that accurate?

Our 5+ in English and Maths is pretty much the same as our C+ in English and Maths has been historically. The new GCSEs have hit different schools and different departments in completely different ways depending on school policies, etc.

My school are quite happy with the rankings and league tables, because we're near the top for our county and have been for quite a few years. Dd1's school is NOT happy with them because they aren't doing so well this year, not sure why really as the actual results seem very good, but the progress 8 has but them hard.

Proof that Progress 8 is bollocks

Thornden (because it gets mentioned so often)
has Progress 8 of 0.24
but the "confidence interval" is 0.1 to 0.49

So the school is "above average" but they have no idea if its nearly "well above average" or actually just "average"

meaningless drivel, the whole lot of it. none of it has any statistical integrity. My daughter cost her school 0.01 of their score last year by misreading a single instruction in the literature paper. That only has to happen 100 times for a school to crash from well above average, to well below. in other words, in the average school, half of all pupils to slip up a little bit once in one paper, or a quarter of all pupils to slip up twice, or even 10 (5%) rushed careless pupils to make a little mistake in each of their papers. How is it in any way a reflection on the teaching if my daughter reads "answer 1 question from section 2" as " answer 2 questions from section 1" or similar, can't remember exactly what it was, but something like that.

I am a little more pro Progress 8 because where I work looks like the bees knees and that is an accurate representation of the school's results. We had a very weak cohort last year who did exceptionally well but this was as much down to the 'nature' of the year group. They were incredibly hard working and focused and behaviour was excellent. The current Y11 are different...

Equally I think P8 will help SN pupils and able pupils because their progress is as important as the old C/D borderline pupils who used to take so much focus away from them. I cannot think of any fair way to judge schools so maybe just abolish league tables.

I cannot think of any fair way to judge schools so maybe just abolish league tables

well, there is a way to make these measures statistically significant. If you take the average over 8 years, rather than concentrating on a single year at a time, these numbers do actually become meaningful.

Of course, 8 years is longer than any individual's secondary education, twice the length of the average teaching career and more than three times the length of any government system of measuring, so the numbers also become irrelevant for considering culture, teaching or system within the school, but nothing less than an 8 year average has any meaning anyway.

the Ks2 data is corrupt, the ks3 data is corrupt, the schools results are corrupt, and even if they were perfect, the comparisons between the are meaningless, you are looking at nothing other than spin on spin, so unless the difference between two schools is in DOUBLE FIGURES, over a period of YEARS, ( and sometimes it is) forget it