How are schools able to calculate progress 8 scores?

[bestov]

Some of our local achools are putting their 2022 Progress 8 scores online, and saying how great they are, "best ever", etc. How are they even able to calculate them when they don"t have access to all the national data?

And surely they're inevitably going to be the "best ever" (or at least the best ever based on exams rather than teacher assessment) due to this year being a stepping stone down from last year's inflated grades?

Probably because they've paid into a service like FFT, SISRA, 4Matrix etc which will calculate a pseudo A8 estimate from all the schools using the service. They're usually pretty close to the DfE estimates but this year will be tricky as the KS2 data is now scaled scores and we don't have a previous year comparator.

Some will be close to the actual Progress 8 through sheer luck, but in in reality schools shouldn't do this in any year, but this one is particularly difficult due to the changing starting points which the DfE haven't even fully elaborated on quite how that will work. Also any schools who gave TAGs in 2021 to the 2022 cohort won't have those scores counted, now for an individual school that isn't a problem perhaps but it is a problem for how the national estimates and I'm not sure SISRA/FFT/4Matrix will have a handle on that either.

We have an estimated P8 score from some of the data services we buy into. it’s in the +1.2 range which is not our best ever but not far off, but we are being really cautious with that and not putting it up on the website. I imagine it will probably shake down to something closer to +0.9 when all is said and done. We can be pretty certain that it’s a very good score, but it would be silly to try to put an exact number on it right now. What they are publishing are educated guesses based on the data these companies have, which is actually a fair amount. They are unlikely to be spot-on but should give you a rough idea of whether a school’s P8 is going to be great, good, so-so, poor or woeful.

I understand given the financial situation that schools are facing, why some schools feel the need to try to get out positive news stories about results. We aren’t going to be undersubscribed for year 7 but Sixth form recruitment is tougher for us and we rush out positive news stories about results as quickly as we can on results day.