Every year in August, the secondary headteachers in Manchester share data regarding results and headline measures. This gives a sense of the lay of the land before the national data is available. In September 2017, the Manchester results were the canary in the accountability cave, ourselves and the three secondary schools near to us were significantly behind the rest of the city on Progress 8. We serve an area which is an outlier from the main city, a large public housing estate in the south of the city, with a white working-class demographic, quite different from the ethnic diversity found in most city schools.
What had happened? Had we all bombed at the new maths and English GCSEs? Had we all, through some kinetic energy, failed to slalom through the new curriculum? We had a good EBacc score for our context but all four schools were likely to be below the floor standard. I had started my journey at the school in this place and knew full well the tainted comments and tetchy defensiveness being labelled as ”one of the worst secondary schools in the country” (thanks to the Daily Mirror) can bring to a school and the community it serves.
Phone calls arrived, gently investigating “what went wrong”. We had some disappointing results in PE and art but some good results across other subjects. It didn’t matter. We were swimming in the stagnant waters, drifting away from the safety of the shore. As all schools do, we put together a case for the defence, highlighting the impact of a handful of outliers on a small cohort. Despite opening a £11.6 million campus expansion, the new school term started with a defensive shoulder chip.
Meetings inevitably took place, when the results were explained and we tried to publicise our EBacc score but one was made to feel that these were excuses, Progress 8 told the tale. Late in the autumn term, we were featured in Tes magazine, discussing the impact of deprivation on schools, and the sympathetic tone of the article was a rare opportunity to present the complexity of challenges facing schools in our context. Nevertheless, on the last day of the autumn term, just after I had made a speech saying farewell to a longstanding colleague, an email arrived from the regional schools commissioner’s office; they wanted to visit, and it was clear that it wasn’t to celebrate our brilliant teacher training or character education.
Progress 8 ‘punishes schools’
Spring arrived, the visit was planned for, and the day-to-day life of a busy urban school happened at its usual frenetic pace. Yet I found myself having similar conversations with colleagues who served communities like ours - almost universally Progress 8 was punishing for them and they were being reprimanded or worse by the messages this measure sent out. The DfE adviser who visited us was challenging but also empathetic, and was impressed with much of our provision. You could feel the tension as he wanted to be positive but the dark cloud of Progress 8 tainted his desire to offer a sunny forecast. Then, miraculously, the clouds began to lift.
A headteacher in Wigan, Ian Butterfield, who I had never met, sent me a graph. A research scientist in a previous life, Ian had mined the national dataset and aligned Progress 8 with both deprivation and ethnicity. Why set out on this onerous task? One of Ian’s peers had been sacked by a multi-academy trust because of Progress 8 and Ian was incensed. I looked at the graph long and hard and felt a mixture of emotions: relief, anger, shock. The correlation was stark. Essentially, if you served an area with high deprivation and a predominantly white population, statistically Progress 8 was likely to be starkly grim for your school. High English as an additional language or a mainly white but affluent catchment and Progress 8 was likely to be favourable. Suddenly six months of angst that we had suddenly veered off a cliff changed to anger at the fact that it took a headteacher to prove that Progress 8 predominantly measured population not progress.
We shared Ian’s work far and wide within education and with the support of Tes, John Tomsett and Stephen Tierney the graphs began to create a news story that was picked up by numerous newspapers and the BBC. The correlation was so stark that it seemed undeniable and it demanded action, yet the response from the DfE was dismissive. A lot had been invested in explaining Progress 8 and it was too divisive and expensive to unpick the new world order. It was complex, too - I was bumped by BBC 5 Live for coverage of a music festival - the story was important but statistical.
Continuously we were told that Progress 8 was only one of several measures used to judge schools and that it was the fairest measure there was. We were asked repeatedly, “What would you replace it with?” We replied “Contextual Value Added”, which is the Jane Eyre of measures - lock it up in the attic and hope no one remembers its brilliance. What we knew, from first-hand and anecdotal evidence, was that the party line on Progress 8 wasn’t true - the measure was dictating inspection outcomes and this was obviously devastating news for schools where Progress 8 was likely to be the scythe for the grim reaper of accountability.
Once again, fate intervened. A head sent me another set of graphs. This time from Ofsted. Seeing these graphs, I went into full rant mode and some colleagues in my office looked at me like I’d finally snapped. The graphs showed that if you were in a school that served an area of high deprivation with a predominantly white population, there was a 4 per cent chance of the school being “outstanding”. In the most affluent category of schools, 58 per cent were “outstanding”. The data was incendiary and again Tes and Stephen Tierney did a brilliant job of publicising it. Despite some nit-picking, Ofsted never refuted the data and it was starkly clear that Progress 8 defined inspection outcomes with depressing accuracy. FFT Education Datalab confirmed this in another piece of excellent research. The breach in the accountability system was severe and it felt like the ship was sinking but no one was calling for the lifeboats; as long as the Progress 8 ship was still floating, a full-on evacuation wasn’t needed.
At the end of this slightly random voyage, where are we? Progress 8 will set the floor standard this year and, with a population that is 90 per cent pupil premium and 90 per cent white British, that feels daunting. We haven’t seen the new Ofsted inspection framework but surely there will be greater sensitivity to context and challenge? How do you incentivise leadership in difficult schools without far greater nuance? Surely the myth that “all schools are equal, some just try harder” has irrevocably been blown apart. Or maybe we’re just making excuses and have to pull up our socks to compete with our more affluent peers.
What is clear is that teachers sharing information and research has created a powerful evidence base to challenge the overly punitive, sledgehammer English accountability system. Progress indeed.
James Eldon is the principal at Manchester Enterprise Academy and CEO at The Altius Trust
