WIREDGOV

Blog posted by: Esme Winch, Managing Director, Thursday 16 February 2017.

While there has been an improvement in the number of schools falling below the new Progress 8 floor standard, it remains to be seen whether this will continue as different ways of calculating the measure are introduced.

On 19 January the Times Educational Supplement reported that nearly 300 schools have now fallen below the new Progress 8 floor standard. This is an improvement on the number last summer, which was reported to be 329.

However, the improvement that’s been realised may be short-lived due to the way in which the measure will be calculated from next year. Pupils who achieve an increase in their grades from a ‘B’ to an ‘A’ will be awarded 1.5 points, whereas pupils increasing their grade from a ‘G’ to an ‘F’ will only get 0.5 points. The logic behind this is that it’s allegedly harder for a pupil to increase their grades at higher levels than for those at lower levels. Whether this change in the way the measure is calculated has an adverse effect on school Progress 8 measures, by penalising learners who achieve within the lower grade range more harshly, is yet to be seen.

It seems the biggest barrier to the rollout of Progress 8 has been parents’ understanding of what it aims to measure and the intention of this metric, which is to capture the progress a learner makes from the end of primary school to the end of secondary school.

It is calculated for each learner by comparing their achievement – their Attainment 8 score – with the average Attainment 8 score of all pupils nationally with a similar starting point (or ‘prior attainment’). The idea is that this provides an indication of the ‘progress’ made.

The Attainment 8 is the achievement of a learner across 8 qualifications including maths and English (which are double weighted), 3 qualifications that count in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) measure, and 3 further qualifications that can be GCSE qualifications or equivalent technical awards from the Department for Education (DfE) approved list.

NCFE V Cert qualifications are eligible to be included within the 3 further qualifications in school accountability measures.

We welcome Attainment 8 being more open to technical provision; however, it does place further restriction on the qualifications that schools can choose for their learners to undertake. We can hope that the DfE will look at expanding the measure to include more technical provision for learners that wish to take them.

We can be certain that Progress 8 is the focus now and in the near future. It is our hope that this will evolve to include greater scope for alternative provisions which support the needs of learners who may excel in areas outside of the traditionally academic domain.