Progress 8 question

[Everythingsgroovy]

Can you expect Progress 8 scores for pupils with prior high attainment to be as high as for pupils with prior middle attainment?

I’d never looked beyond the headline Progress 8 score (bold below) before but am now wondering if comprehensive schools can cater for low, middle and high prior attainers or if that’s not really possible.

School A- 0.59 (Comprehensive with reputation for high achievement)
L 0.55 M 0.74 H 0.27

School B 0.29 (Comprehensive with reputation for nurturing)
L 0.64 M 0.24 H -0.01

School C -0.01 (Comprehensive with mixed/poor reputation)
L -0.35 M -0.12 H 0.64

School D 0.89 (Grammar school)
L N/A M 2.16 H 0.74

If a school has a disproportionately high achieving intake then there is less scope for huge amounts of “value add”, so Progress 8 may be limited. You would still want to see a positive (or at least neutral score) for the high achieving cohort though.

Schools that have the highest overall Progress 8 are likely to be those who do a great job of teaching a low to middle achieving intake, so lots of value add in really bringing up their scores.

Personally if looking at Progress 8 I’d decide if my child is lower, middle or high achieving and then look at the scores for that cohort.

To answer your question, I think in theory it should be possible for a comp to have positive value adds for all cohorts, but whether this happens in practice is an another question.

i could be wrong but if your child is bright and motivated I would hope for a school with bright motivated classmates and look for a poor progress 8 but high final grades.

All of those schools have reasonable P8 scores based on prior attainment. School B hasn’t added as much value to its higher prior attainers but you don’t have the exact detail, for some kids L7+ will barely add any value but they’ve still got great outcomes. Look at attainment as well.

I would look at Progress 8 and Attainment 8. Locally most of the difference in attainment is accounted for by the progress score i.e. a higher progress score correlates with a higher attainment score in a fully comprehensive area.

Mid prior attainment at selective schools are likely to have significantly underperformed at primary school.

There is a cap on Progress for high prior attainment. In 2022 that was 0.7 for a student who got full marks at KS2 and straight 9s at GCSE.

At my DDs school its low- 0.59, middle 0.61 high 0.76 average 0.63. So yes, it is possible to be reasonably consistent.

High attainers are those getting 110 SATs average.

I agree its important to look at all the stats though... nonohe piece if data tells the whole story. P8 is just a statistical analysis (which won't be available for the next couple of years as the Y6 data doesn't exist)

The highest p8 for high prior attainers in your list is at the grammar school. The highest p8 for anyone is middle attainers at the grammar school. This suggests, despite any cap, you can still hope to see high p8s for highly (prior) achieving cohorts at any school.

Imo the best schools are doing well by everyone. Not exactly the same but no one left behind. School c is doing surprisingly well by high attainers but not by anyone else, which would put me off.

Thank you everyone.

Does anyone know if there is a way of breaking down Progress 8 scores any further?

There is a big difference between scoring exceeding at 110 and those scoring at 140 on standardised scores. Or is it 110 at SATS (even then I'd say a big difference between those who are scoring 110 and 120)

Thanks

@Everythingsgroovy you should also look at the "confidence interval" for each of those figures. You'll find it on the Compare Schools website, but people tend to ignore it because they're not sure what it means. In simple terms, confidence intervals are "error bars" which reflect the size of the cohort. The larger the cohort, the more confidence you can have in the headline P8 figure, so the error bars will be narrow. A very small cohort will have wide error bars.

Imagine an extreme case: a school has only one child in their "low" group, and only because that child was ill during his SATs. His parents invest heavily in tutoring to compensate, he catches up and ends up getting all 7-9s in his GCSEs. That school would be awarded a fantastic P8 for low attainers, but the confidence intervals would be very wide because one student isn't enough to give you confidence in the results.

It's also worth mentioning that P8 does not correct for demographics.

The University of Bristol have formed an "Adjusted Progress 8" measure which takes into account pupil age, gender, ethnicity, EAL, SEN, FSM, and residential deprivation: https://www.northernpowerhousepartnership.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Fairer-Schools-Index-Report-1.pdf

They are making a case for the DfE to formally adopt this measure and report it alongside P8.

Key findings are:

• Adjusting for pupil background would see the national league table rankings of almost a quarter of schools (23.7%) change by over 500 places.
• Adjusting for pupil background would lead 48% of schools currently judged ‘Well Below Average’ under Progress 8 to move up out of this banding.
• The high average Progress 8 score seen in London more than halves when adjusted for pupil background. This is principally due to these schools teaching high proportions of high-progress ethnic groups. In contrast, the low average Progress 8 score seen in the North East improves substantially after adjustment due to the high proportions of poor and White British pupils taught in this region.
• Other dramatic changes are seen for grammar schools and faith schools whose high average Progress 8 scores reduce substantially once the educationally advantaged nature of their pupils is considered. In contrast, the low average pupil progress seen in sponsored academies improves once the disadvantaged nature of their pupils is recognised.
• Progress 8 effectively punishes schools teaching high proportions of disadvantaged pupils for the national underperformance of these groups.
• Progress 8 can therefore be argued to give too much emphasis to schools, rather than Government or society, as primarily responsible for the national underperformance of these groups. In contrast, adjusted versions of Progress 8 can be viewed as rebalancing the responsibility more on society and Government, rather than schools.

@Everythingsgroovy Your grammar has the highest P8. This is probably because it has no low achievers or middle achievers but can teach very well to dc who don’t have barriers to learning. Most schools will tell you that getting improvement out of the low achievers is the most difficult thing to do. Therefore comps are limited by the presence of these dc. It’s the same in primary schools.

All these schools are positive and none are minus. I too would look at subjects and attainment.

"but am now wondering if comprehensive schools can cater for low, middle and high prior attainers or if that’s not really possible."

@Everythingsgroovy They should, but whether they can or not is dependent on their priorities and individual teachers' experience of teaching the most able.

Ofsted no longer judges schools by headline P8 data. Under the current Ofsted framework they use the School Inspection Data Summary report (IDSR) to highlight areas where schools might be underperforming. This is what it says about Key Stage 4 results: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-inspection-data-summary-report-idsr-guide#progress-and-attainment-at-key-stage-4

If a particular group score significantly below national data then Ofsted will focus on that to find out why.

My comprehensive school has a fantastic overall P8, but when the leadership team saw the IDSR they realised they were letting down higher attainers. It became a focus for the school development plan, and teachers are being given additional training on helping higher attainers to achieve top grades.

It's possible but one of the variables is persistent low attendance in the lower attainment groups (either because of the factors that led to the low attainment in the first place, but also because low prior attainers find schoolwork hard by definition). And low attendance brings down scores because you miss content.

@meeningless Assessment data in school should have told them that. As a junior school governor 10 years ago, we knew progress was far more difficult to achieve from our lower attainers. It’s nearly always a focus. We also knew our higher attainers got really good progress. Accurate assessment and a challenging curriculum ensured that. Whatever ofsted do, it should not expose schools don’t know how well or otherwise dc are progressing. They should know how every group is performing.

Yes, internal data did tell them that, but it also told them a lot of other things, so it was getting lost in the noise. Their natural instinct was to focus on getting lower attainers over the line, and on narrowing the PP gap. The IDSR helped them to realise they needed to add an additional priority to the list.

The IDSR is available to schools on tap - they did not wait for Ofsted to visit - they made sure it was added to the School Development Plan and in progress before they visited. When they visited they could see that a plan was in place to address the issue so were content that the school leadership continued to be outstanding.

@meeningless It’s fairly common, in comp schools, to not be aware that higher achievers have needs too. Their needs do indeed get lost. Too many schools allow them to coast.

May be common but not universal. My local comp (outstanding) has excellent results for HPA across the board but the PP/ DA outcomes are significantly below where they should be. As a result the school development plan is focused on improving PP outcomes. This is about teaching but also about improving attendance and an overall feeling of belonging.

It's worth adding that, in the same inspection, Ofsted were not nearly as concerned about the PP-gap as some leaders expected them to be. This was mainly because the inspectors could see the school was doing everything it could to address it (and had records to prove that), but also partly because the number of PP students was relatively low and the confidence intervals (mentioned in my post above) were therefore wide.

As someone mentioned above, one of the biggest influences on progress is attendance, and that is often outside of the school's control.

I have taught across state and independent, super selective, somewhat selective, selective by house prices, inclusive, not very inclusive, and where there's an achievement problem, there's almost always an attendance problem.

You simply can't teach kids that aren't there.

And that goes for rich kids as much as it does the economically disadvantaged - although the former can pay tutors, attend crammers etc.

The school I taught at with the highest achievement also had attendance so high that they won a regional award for it.

@BreathesOutSlowly I agree not universal but you certainly read Ofsted reports that say the brightest are not appropriately challenged. Definitely at primary level. Schools must identify all dc who aren’t making great progress. PP DC will always be looked at because of the money received. Usually the brightest don’t get this but that’s not universal either. The bottom line is that everyone matters.

@meeningless
Thank you! The information you have given me has been really interesting and helpful.

Schools have such a difficult job trying to meet the needs of different groups.

I’ve added in the Attainment scores below. Do you think the difference between PMA and PHA at school A is something the school would look at?

Locally, School A is where parents are happy to send high achieving DC if they don’t want to go for a 40min drive to a grammar school (School D). Parents of high achievers choose School A over School B.

School C is the school my nephew will attend which is in a different county. I was just surprised by how well the PHA did compared to the headline values. My brother has since said that the school does have quite a transient population of forces children so this probably relates to what @Needlenardlenooand @BreathesOutSlowlyhave said about attendance.

School A- 0.59 54
(Comp with rep for high achievement)
L 0.55 M 0.74 H 0.27
L 33.3 M 54.4 H 69

School B 0.29 48.9
(Comp with rep for nurturing)
L 0.64 M 0.24 H -0.01
L 34.2 M 50 H 64

School C -0.01 45.4
(Comp with mixed/poor rep)
L -0.35 M -0.12 H 0.64
L 23.3 M 45.4 H 71

School D 0.89 77.1
(Grammar school)
L N/A M 2.16 H 0.74
L N/A M 74.9 H 77.2

@Everythingsgroovy well yes, they perhaps should be looking at the high prior attainment group. Whether they are or not depends on the leadership. If it's the school I think it is (beginning with H?) then it's well overdue an Ofsted inspection. Their last inspection was under the old Ofsted framework.

"School C is the school my nephew will attend which is in a different county ... the school does have quite a transient population of forces children so this probably relates to ... attendance"

Transient populations correlate to low "stability" rather than necessarily low attendance. Schools obviously have a better chance of positively influencing a student's progress if they have taught them since year 7 than if they arrive half-way though year 10. This is why undersubscribed schools can feel like they fighting a losing battle - they get many children who have moved schools for various reasons, but they have to take full responsibility for their progress since year 6.

@Everythingsgroovy there's something anomalous about school C. Its Key Stage 4 cohort was 166 students, but only 111 of them had key stage 2 results that could be used as a benchmark for progress data. If students don't have KS2 SATs results it usually means they either moved from abroad or else moved from the private sector or perhaps for some reason there was a local primary school that didn't do SATs that year. It's unlikely to be families moving from abroad because school C only had 3 EAL students in that cohort. I've attached population stats for all 4 schools.

@meeningless yes- H! How funny you could tell!

We’re very lucky to have such great choices. It’s been interesting to look beyond the headline figures and it’s made me realise even more that comprehensive schools really do have to be comprehensive!