Can anyone explain what the Progress 8 score is?

[believebelievebelieve]

Tried googling it but I still don't understand.

Basically it's related to SAT scores and baseline tests that secondary schools do...so where children are predicted to get to when they reach GCSEs level.
So it's comparing where they start to where they get across 8 of their best subjects and in order for schools to have a positive impact on children this needs to align or improve. So if you're predicted to get As and you get Bs then that's a begative measure.
Not sure if I've explained well!

Negative not begative!!!

Marking my place, I've got a week to finalise secondary choices and am having nightmares about it . I can't get my head around the P8 scores at all. The new gcse grades seem to have altered the P8 scores too.

As MsJolly says, it is a way of measuring progress from y6 SATs to y11 GCSEs.

This is so you can compare two schools and how much value added they give pupils rather than just looking at %5A-C which will be massively impacted by the ability of the children it accepts. (So which is better, the coasting grammar that gets 85%A/A grades, or the comp which only gets 60% A-C, it might well be the comp).

Generally, the more positive a score the better, and the more negative a score the worse. However there are various imperfections (to put it lightly) and the measuring to 2 decimal places is crazy, so don't assume that a school with score 0.28 is any better than one with 0.21.

What MsJolly said.

So it’s their actual Attainment 8 score minus their predicted (from KS2 Sats) Attainment 8 score.

Positive means they did better than average for the KS2 results they started with.

meglet Personally I would only use P8 as a tiny, tiny part of any decision making process unless one school is -0.5 and the other is +0.5.

I know a school who does well by kids it has but 'loses' less able in year 9/10 to local college and this has major positive impact on their progress and attainment 8.
Lots of flaws with this system - favours schools with more able/ advantaged intakes despite arguments to contrary. Rewards A- A* more than E- D etc.
Extra tool to batter schools and teachers with and as usual, advantaged schools with easy intakes benefit.

apologies if this is a daft question but how can it compare progress across 8 subjects when KS2 sats will only give a baseline for literacy and maths?

There's a short video explaining the Progress 8 here www.gov.uk/government/publications/progress-8-school-performance-measure.
Roughly if pupils in a school are making the expected levels of progress from Y6 to Y11 their progress 8 score will be zero.
A positive score means they are performing better than expected and vice versa for negative.
A score of +1.0 means that on average pupils at this school are achieving one grade higher than expected. So +0.5 means half a grade better.
Any school with a score less than -0.5 may be a sign of a problem.
It is up to you to decide if half a grade means anything or not.
Please note that the data for 2017 is for results issued in August. I am aware that in some schools there will be changes by January when remarks are taken into account. (There have been some marking problems in some new GCSEs and marks may have gone up).
The other thing to take into account is that not all GCSE subjects count equally for Progress 8. English and Maths are double weighted but the next "bucket" is for EBacc subjects. So a pupil taking 3 EBacc subjects will score more for Progress 8 than one with only 2 subjects if they both have the same final grades and starting points.

Not a daft question onewhitewhiskers. It doesn't really! Major flaw in all the techniques used to measure progress from ks2.
If you teach art or music your target grade will be based on maths or literacy scores. Not really fair!

Dizzy, last year, progress across all grade boundaries was considered the same. So if you are iorried that this year's Progress8 favours schools with a high proportion of the more able (i'd probably join you in that concern), it is worth looking at last year's vs this year's progress8.

Certainly the grammar school which last year had a significantly negative progress8 now has an 'average' one of around 0, so the fiddling with the measurement seems to have done what politicians wanted it to do - turn the spotlight away from the fact that the grammar schools they favour don't always enable students to make good progress, and that their high raw results are because of their selective intake.

thanks whathave!

I do find sneaky tactics to favour latest government obsessions deeply depressing.
Ebacc subjects have their place but other subjects also valuable. When parents look at bottom lines they often don't look at political shenanigans embedded in process.
Not surprised you are struggling op.
Hard to get head round unless you take at face value which is not acknowledging deep flaws.
Sigh, sigh, sigh!!!!

But how do you know the progress is down to the school, and not down to parents paying for extra tuition? I'm in the south-east, and there does seem to be a big tuition industry.

Many schools do well out of parents using tutors or simply relying on advantaged vs disadvantaged parents. Clearly some schools have more supportive and educated parents than others- they will impact on progress and results.
Some schools have higher hills to climb and are blasted at from all angles.
For example, more likely for a 'middle-class' school to get outstanding ofsted than one in a more deprived area.

Roughly if pupils in a school are making the expected levels of progress from Y6 to Y11 their progress 8 score will be zero.

This isn't quite true. It's not comparing students against some theoretical 'expected level of progress' but comparing them against the other students in the cohort who got the same KS2 scores as them.

Each GCSE grade is assigned points (when they are numerical, this will just be the same as the grade). They are added up for 8 GCSEs (there are rules about which GCSEs can count), then divided by 10 (as maths and English count twice) to give an average point score per GCSE.
If a kid gets an average point score of 5.5, but the average point score of kids nationally who got the same KS2 results as them was 6, then their progress 8 would be -0.5. The individual progress 8 scores for each kid in the school are added and divided by the number of kids to get the progress 8 for the school.

It's nothing to do with computer generated target grades for individual subjects, kids aren't compared against targets, they are compared against other kids' actual performance that year.

Should also point out that if Kid A and B have identical KS2 point scores, then it doesn't matter if Kid A takes Music and Kid B takes PE, their average grade across their 8 GCSEs will be compared against each other regardless of which subjects they take.

Kid A and B will have different backgrounds- possibly [unless twins].
All sorts of variables.

Doesn't matter, background isn't taken into account.

To be fair, though, noble, I would take social background of pupils at a school into account when looking at progress8 for a school.

A school with a +0.6 Progress8 and very high PP in a rough part of a town, for example, would make me think it was a better school in terms of enabling pupils to make progress than a school with a similar Progrss8 from a cohort with very low PP and low social deprivation within the catchment.

It's another load of bollocks orchestrated to give parents something to obsess over and the government piss off educators even further. It's highly subjective and entirely reductionist.

The government will move onto whatever the next fad is soon and it'll be changed within 3 or so years.

How does this work in a super selective grammar where DC enter with very high results and achieve the high result they are predicted. Is it harder for these schools to score highly on progress 8?

No, it's easier for them to get good progress 8 scores because achievement at KS2 is capped at the top of level 5 for the purposes of progress 8, while those in grammars will have a current level at the end of KS2 well ahead of that. They have to achieve less real progress to get high results than a pupil who genuinely got a high level 5.

To be fair, noble, it's not as simple as that, because attainment at GCSE ihas also beencapped, at A*.

So while it is true that superselective grammars benefit in one way - because many will enter Y7 with higher 'true attainment' than their KS2 SATs measure - they lose in another because there is less scope for them to 'overachieve' against target at the end of Y11. So while a child whose SATs lead to a target of C can overachieve and get an A - 3 grades above their target - a child arriving at a ggrammar with a 5 can maybe only 'overachieve' against their target by a grade - from a top A.

If the government ever works out how to convert the new numerical SATs scores into Progress8 to new 9-1 GCSEs, there is a possibility that the anomalies at both points will be reduced, as the translation of scaled score to GCSE grade has the opportunity to be slightly more finely nuanced.

There's three more years of old KS2 data to go yet, and I reckon achievement at KS2 is way more capped than at KS4.

Look at the transition matrix for maths. Only 50% of those who got a 5A at KS2 went on to get an A* at GCSE. And those 50% are far more likely to be the ones who actually got a level 6, or who sat GCSE early, and they are going to be overrepresented in grammar schools.

Remember Progress 8 isn't actually about levels of progress, it's about comparing attainment of the kids in your cohort to the attainment of kids nationally with the same starting point. If everyone with a 5A or above is registered as a 5A, then those who were really level 6+ are going to be more likely to be getting the A*s, making the grammar school cohort look better than the national picture.

Everyone else in the country is going to be in a fair fight (or as fair as you can expect from a crap system) against kids who actually did attain the same as them.