What does this progress 8 score mean?

[36and3]

Other than I get they're doing well but what does it actually mean in layman's terms? It's our nearest school and most likely dd will get a place for September. It's an all girls though which does put us off. Otherwise oftsed outstanding for the past few inspections.

Haha willl start again!! Wrong thread!! Pic was for potty training thread

Take 2

This explains it:

Essentially means that pupils on average are performing half a grade better in their GCSEs than they were expected to according to their KS2 scores in their SATS
A minus/negative score indicates the school isn't performing very well because the student is making less progress than expected

Op any positive figure is good. Not many schools will get to 2-4 for P8.

So it looks good to me. What are your other options if you don't like all girls? I'm not a fan either but I know lots of ppl, whose opinions I value and respect, who have had positive experiences with single sex.

Means the school is probably in the top 1% in the country for progress that pupils make between KS2 and KS4. It has it's pros and cons.
Pros- can show that just because a school gets good GCSEs it doesn't mean they're better than the school down the road that gets worse results. Progress 8 shows how much progress kids have made from y6 sats to GCSEs, some schools just get very clever intakes so GCSE grades aren't necessarily a good indicator of progress, as those kids started off clever so should be passing anyway.
Cons- Lots of primary schools are under pressure to have good sats results so really drill their kids in the test, meaning they get artificially high scores that aren't an accurate representation of that child's ability. That child starts secondary school with very high targets that aren't sustainable and their secondary will look like they've failed them. Equally schools that get kids from very bad primaries may find it easier to get high progress.
Progress 8 obviously doesn't include kids who didn't do sats, so schools with a high intake of kids who haven't done sats, can't include them in their scores even if they've made tons of progress.
I may be wrong on this but schools can only include kids who were in the school in y10 and 11 meaning a child who entered late and the school put a shift in to catch them up won't be included.
It's calculated using buckets and subjects that aren't so academic get less points per bucket.

Generally speaking it's a good snapshot but I wouldn't put all your trust in it. Besides, this won't be around for the next 2 or so years as the COVID y6s didn't do sats so there's no comparison. I would filter their results by prior attainment. It's a good indicator of what results children with your child's ability get. Eg for my DD I've always checked how many low prior attainers pass, as that tells me their support for Sen is probably quite good if more than 20% of low prior attainers are passing.
The breakdown of how many kids are in each group ( low, middle and high prior attainers) is also a good indicator of what type of intake they have. Some schools are very bottom heavy, meaning lots of kids are in the low or middle bracket, it may be because they're in a grammar area, or they just have a reputation for supporting Sen well which tends to put off parents with high prior attainers.

Not many schools will get to 2-4 for P8.

What is 2-4. The max for Progress 8 is 1

Hmm I agree that 1 is the usual high figure, but I knew I had read on MN recently of a school that did better – the Michaela School in London has a P8 of 2.37. There’s also a couple of schools in Birmingham with a P8 of almost 2. Nowhere near 4 it’s true but above 1 seems to be possible, if uncommon (but then I did say that).

@36and3 others have answered your question, but bear in mind that figure is for the 2023 GCSE results. You'll be able to see the 2024 results when they're published on October 24th.

You can absolutely have a progress 8 score greater than 1. Michaela's P8 score is 2.37.

It represents how many grades higher in each GCSE sat a child will achieve compared to the average school.

So in the OP's school, kids who would achieve say nine grade 7s in the average school would get nine grade 8s in the OP's school.

DDs school has a progress score over 1.5.

A progress score of 1 essentially means that a kid who would normally get all Bs in GCSE at an average school would get all As. If the progress score was -1 then they would get all Cs. This is all average obviously!

Sorry when I say A B C, I mean 4, 5, 6 etc!

It only means that in theory.

In practice, it's more complicated. For example, my school's P8 would have been 0.5 higher if the grades of just 4 students had been excluded. They had a massive impact on the results because they were persistently absent in key stage 4 and missed some or all of their exams. If those 4 students had gone to the Michaela School they probably would have been managed out before the deadline for registering for exams, or else their parents would have removed them due to the impact of the extreme discipline on their already-fragile mental health.

If you delve deeper you can find a breakdown for high, middle and low attainers. So if you know roughly where your DD sits on that scale, you can see whether the school is good for her as well.

Yeah I did mention that it’s all averages.

You are quite right that often schools are just good at getting rid of the kids they know won’t do well :(

It also does depend quite a bit on how hot-housey the feeder primary schools are.

As far as I’m aware it means that it’s the difference between when they started and their grades. So a score of 1 would mean they got on average 1 grade higher per gcse than expected according to their Sats results.
So it can let you know how well a school has progressed the children, irrelevant of what level they came in at.

There's also the aspect of what your cohort is like in terms of KS2 attainment - a school that tends to admit a lot of children who were only just acquiring basic English skills by Year 6 is likely to have a significantly higher P8 once they've had five years of secondary education. Add in that cases where children were privately educated at Primary (as many posters on here say, that's often due to SEND), so in terms of progress, they aren't even included and therefore can't bring the P8 scores down from not having their needs met - and a tendency to manage out lower attaining kids, such as some of the academies do every single year, permanently excluding for behaviour that they wouldn't have done for a higher ability teenager, also helps the figures along.

I don't see mathematically how this can be the case. Extremely negative scores are capped precisely so they can't disproportionately affect progress 8 scores. Is your school tiny?

Well spotted (no less than I'd expect for a maths teacher 🙂). Checking back, it was actually the p8 for the disadvantaged sub-group that was impacted by 0.5. The impact on the whole cohort was less.

It is a relatively small school, so our 95% confidence range is wide, but nobody looks at that.

Ah that makes more sense for a subgroup. I even got my calculator out to try to make it work 😂

Yes, no one looks at confidence intervals, the number is the number. School A with 0.5 is definitely better than school B with 0.3 etc etc.

These school probably receive kids with a terrible SAT results from really bad primaries and as they are really really good schools they make miracles. Otherwise, it would not be possible to make such a step.

I’m not sure that they would need to be that terrible. The Henrietta Barnet school which is ✨hyper✨ selective has a progress score of 1.1. I know it’s not 2.something but these girls are really high achievers and the progress is still above 1. 2,626 girls took the entrance exam this year and there are only 100 spaces.

Only 19/121 (16%) students at Michaela last year were previous “low” attenders (under 100 scaled score in the SATs). I think the national percentage was 39% - but I’m not sure what it was for this years GCSE cohort. Their progress score was 2.37.

The Henrietta Barnet school which is ✨hyper✨ selective has a progress score of 1.
And that is what surprises me. It is the selective school, hard to get in. The kids that got in passed the SATs with flying marks 120 pt out of 120 points or 118 out of 120. How on Earth they can improve their results at GCSE? There is nothing to improve. There is a very narrow gap to improve.

Passing SATs with max score is much easier than getting 11+ at a level to get into Henrietta Barnet.
Very weird

It will be because they have few, if any, under-achievers. If they exist at all then they may be managed out, either actively, or passively through the gradual realisation that this isn't the school for them. Parents are likely to be competitive, so many will top up with extra tutoring if they feel their child isn't keeping up. Also, they are unlikely to have new joiners in Key Stage 4 - grammar schools actively discourage it (e.g. I believe Tiffin Boys has recently altered its admissions policy along these lines).

Most non-selective schools have many children with low attendance, children whose parents don't put education before everything else, and children who join key stage 4 with big gaps in their learning. All these things add up to reduce their P8, no matter how good the teaching is. They also have to concentrate in helping children with a wide range of abilities to meet a wide range of targets, not just high attainers, so their resources are spread more thinly.

Ok I’ve gone down a rabbit hole. Last year the maximum possible “estimated attainment 8” score was 81.97 — so kids who got 120/120 on the SATs could improve that by getting all 9s in their GCSE’s, their individual progress 8 would be 90-81.97/10 = 0.803.

A child with a fantastic but less perfect SAT score of 117 would have an estimated score of 75.6. So actually all 9s would give them a progress of 1.44!

historical tables are here - https://sisraanalytics.support.junipereducation.org/hc/en-gb/article_attachments/16494912896285#page2