With the release of today’s school performance tables, I want to congratulate the hardworking school leaders, teachers and pupils in schools. 

Their performance is all the more impressive given that we have a government which has now spent nearly seven years chaotically intervening in our schools, chopping and changing everything from curriculums, to assessments, to structures. 

When this is coupled with the fact that all our schools are facing serious, real-terms budget cuts for the first time in 20 years, it is an incredible achievement to see so many schools doing well. 

Our school leaders, teachers, support staff, pupils - and their families - deserve a huge amount of credit for that achievement. However, we cannot ignore the fact that more than 300 schools are failing, by this new measure.

Of particular concern is the fact that the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers is widening. 

This government’s plans for new grammar schools will do nothing except increase that attainment gap. Creaming off those who are better at passing exams at an earlier age from the rest is no way to encourage social mobility.

‘Wrong-headed policy’

If the prime minister examined the evidence she would abandon this dogmatic, wrong-headed policy.

But the other question that we need to ask, is how do we measure the academic success and progress of pupils in our schools?

The government thinks it has the answer, with its new Progress 8 system. 

Now bear with me. 

In simple terms, Progress 8 should, according to the Department for Education, “give an indication of whether, as a group, pupils in the school made above- or below-average progress compared to similar pupils in other schools”. 

Progress 8 is a school-wide measurement, though it is also calculated for individual pupils. 

Progress 8 first takes the Attainment 8 score for individual pupils, which is based on how a pupil performs across eight qualifications (geddit?).

To further complicate matters, English and maths are then double-weighted, three are English Baccalaureate subjects, and three can be any GCSE or DfE approved non-GCSE qualification. 

Still with me? 

Anyway, this is then compared with the Attainment 8 scores of pupils who had similar results in tests taken at age 11. 

This gives the Progress 8 score for individual pupils, which is then used to calculate a school’s overall Progress 8 score. 

This is, at the risk of serious understatement, not entirely straightforward.

‘Bewildering complexity’

It is no surprise then that, according to a poll carried out by TES, teachers believe that only 1 per cent of parents understand Progress 8. 

I’m surprised it’s that high. 

Bewildering complexity aside, the government says that its new metrics will encourage schools to focus on delivering a broad curriculum, ensuring that pupils at all levels of attainment are given the support they need to succeed. 

This is theoretically achieved by examining a broader range of subjects than any five, including maths and English, and by looking at performance across a whole school, rather than at the A*-C range, which, critics argue, leads to excessive attention being paid to pupils with grades on the C/D borderline. 

It’s more or less impossible to say whether the government will succeed in these goals until the new tests have been tested, as it were.

However, there are clear difficulties with the new system.

The biggest problem with Progress 8 is that it continues to ignore the fact that the results of schools are driven by structural, not just individual, factors. 

The socio-economic and demographic differences between schools can obviously play a huge role in driving results.

Yet the only external factor that Progress 8 considers is prior attainment.

Crucial external factors

While this is certainly a welcome shift away from the Expected Progress measure (used from 2011-15), which completely ignored external circumstances and prior attainment, it shows that the government either does not understand, or simply chooses to ignore, the external factors that affect school performance.

So, today, when the schools minister hails Progress 8 for showing a narrowing of the attainment gap, we must remember that a key reason for this is simply that the government has abandoned its older, fundamentally flawed, Expected Progress measure. 

By using prior performance, Progress 8 will naturally lower the attainment gap, simply because of the way results are measured, not because of the success of any particular policy.

The second issue is that a particular type of school has its performance overstated by Progress 8.

Grammar schools - this government’s flagship education policy - have their performance seriously overstated by this government’s new accountability metric. 

Finally, Progress 8, under a different name, was first announced in 2013. 

At that time, many educationalists were concerned that the metric and the maths were far too complicated for a school accountability measure.

Looking back, it is clear that the government has failed to heed those concerns.

If the Tories were serious about enabling our children to make progress, they could do three simple things: abandon the looming cuts in school budgets, cut class sizes to less than 30, and halt the brain drain of teachers out of the profession.
Could we call it Progress 3?

Angela Rayner is member of parliament for Ashton-under-Lyne and Labour’s shadow education secretary

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