Schools minister Nick Gibb has revealed that the government is still deciding how schools’ progress will be calculated through the Progress 8 measure in future, after Sats exams were cancelled for 2021, for a second year running. 

Mr Gibb was speaking at a meeting of the Commons Education Select Committee on the GCSE and A-level grading plans for 2021.

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Robert Halfon, chair of the committee, asked Mr Gibb: “On Sats, there will be again no consistent baseline for secondary schools to measure progress in future years with no Sat exam results - so could there be a national baseline assessment for Year 7 pupils, which secondary schools could administer?”

Mr Gibb said: “That would be very much for the school itself to decide.

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“We will be making decisions in due course about the consequences for Progress 8 in terms of those students that have not had Sats in the future, and we’ll have more to say about that as we address those issues.

“My approach to all these very challenging intellectual issues that we have to address is to deal with them step by step in great detail so that we have the right answers to each of those problems,” he added.

“We’ve dealt with 2021 in, I think, a very thorough way with close working with the Ofqual officials - very able people working together collaboratively - and I think they’ve come up with a good solution to a very challenging problem.”

Last year, FFT Education Datalab suggested that the cancellation of Sats exams in 2020 would make it impossible to calculate the Progress 8 measure in the usual way in 2025.