The nights are drawing in, the leaves are falling and performance table season is upon us. This means that around the country, leaders are checking to see when their school data appears on the Department for Education website.

There’s a kind of dual consciousness to this for me. The moment in the summer when I see the actual kids, and celebrate their real successes, sits uncomfortably with the moment when I get the school’s validation as “successful” or not.

But that’s the world we have created. It is not automatically bad, either. Things have happened under the pressure of this system that have benefited children, which, after all, is at the core of everything we do.

Metrics and measurements

However, there is much we can point to that has harmed children too. Every measure created, when freighted with the intensity that comes with our high-stakes accountability and the forced competition between schools, has unintended consequences.

There are problems at every stage. At key stage 5, my school is debating whether we can afford to use AS levels.

For a number of years they have provided a valuable external reality check for our students. But now it seems that students who change course after struggling in Year 12 will dump those poor AS grades into the school’s headline figure. The “failure” that benefits students is a problem for the school.

At KS4, though, those problems loom larger.

At the same time as leaders are checking their 2024 results, they are scratching their heads at how to approach 2025. Because this year, we have no Progress 8. Without KS2 Sats in 2020 or 2021, which were cancelled by the pandemic, there is no “official” measure of high-, middle- or low-ability students - no way to see if they have made the progress demanded.

Other than, of course, our judgement.

A sense of freedom

It took me a while to figure out how great this was. There is an amazing sense of liberation in simply looking at the Year 11 cohort and asking “what do we think they are capable of?” - based not on one number given to us half a decade ago, but on five years of actual teaching, testing and getting to know our students.

And yes, I know the arguments for progress 8. That if we don’t have some measure of progress, how do we recognise those schools that add exceptional value? But the system that we have devised is far too flawed to do that.

Very simply, there is a logical fallacy at the heart of it. The progress measure is grounded in the use of KS2 Sats.

Inconsistencies and opinions

We say to schools, and to children, that Sats are only a measure of the school, not the child. And then we take that data and tie it to each child so it follows them through secondary and defines what their target grades are, what sets they’re in and how their GCSE choices are structured.

Worse than this, we take one (flawed) general assessment, and draw a line from it to another, far more domain-specific assessment, and say that achievement in the two is related, despite the fact that the conceptual cornerstone of our system is that there are no such things as “general” skills.

That’s before we even come to the inconsistencies in the ways the two test types are administered. A child can be given extra time at Sats based on criteria that would not be accepted at GCSE. Schools vary hugely in the amount of intervention and support they give to children.

And some parents believe the protestations of the government that Sats are not about measuring the individual child, so don’t enforce work at home, while others push their children to excel.

Time for change

But there’s something bigger, and even more basic, that sits underneath all of this. We have come to believe too much in the “rigour” of exams. That is not a criticism of high standards, but it is a recognition that we have come to see test scores as gospel.

They have become measures of some indefinable capacity eked out percentage point by percentage point, comparable across subjects and age ranges.

There are many issues facing the curriculum and assessment review, but one of the biggest is how we use performance tables to frame and incentivise the core functions of school.

To me, it seems like madness not to take this two-year hiatus in progress 8 as a chance to rethink the system.

After all, if the “knowledge-rich” revolution has taught us anything, it is that what a test tells us is pretty narrowly circumscribed to the questions it asks. If you want to measure progress, on the most basic level you need to sit the same test twice.

Sammy Wright is author of Exam Nation and a head of school

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