Headteachers’ leaders have urged ministers to put secondary school progress scores on hold for the next two academic years because there is no national test data for how pupils performed at the end of primary school to use as a baseline.
The Department for Education published guidance today that said it is considering an alternative method of producing progress scores for secondary schools in 2024-25 and 2025-26.
The Progress 8 (P8) performance measure uses pupils’ outcomes in key stage 2 Sats as a baseline.
The cohorts who will be in Year 11 in the next two academic years did not carry out these Sats because of the disruption to education in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tom Middlehurst, curriculum, assessment and inspection specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Without a KS2 baseline, there doesn’t seem to us a feasible way of publishing a progress figure for the next two academic years.
“A decision has already been made not to publish primary school progress scores for cohorts that did not take KS1 tests, and we can’t see how or why the government would take a different approach to secondary accountability.”
He was reacting to a DfE guidance document on secondary school accountability measures published today.
Alternative options to measure progress
The DfE document said: ”As primary tests and assessments were cancelled in academic years 2019-20 and 2020-21 due to Covid-19 disruption, there will be no KS2 prior attainment data available to use to calculate Progress 8 when the relevant cohorts reach the end of KS4 in academic years 2024-25 and 2025-26.
“We will explore whether there are any alternative options for producing a progress measure in the affected years, and will announce our approach in due course.”
Last year the DfE confirmed that it will not be publishing primary school progress measures for 2023-24 or 2024-25 because it does not have data from KS1 to use to provide a baseline for these pupils’ attainment.
The Standards and Testing Agency announced that KS1 Sats will no be longer statutory from the 2023-24 academic year, after years of lobbying from education unions.
What is Progress 8?
P8 aims to capture the progress that pupils make from the end of primary school to the end of KS4.
The baseline became one of the DfE’s main performance measures for schools from 2015-16.
Before this, schools had been measured on the proportion of pupils who achieved at least five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths.
This performance measure was replaced amid concerns that it had encouraged schools to focus disproportionately on pupils who were on the C/D borderline.
DfE pauses plan to shake up EBacc
The DfE has also said that it is not moving ahead with plans to change how it measures the take-up of English Baccalaureate subjects.
Last year, the DfE said it wanted to move to a “headline EBacc attainment measure that incentivises full EBacc entry”.
Tes revealed last year that there were concerns that the DfE could risk breaching its own workload protocols by announcing planned changes to school performance tables with less than a full academic year’s notice.
In the new update, the department said: “As stated in the October guidance, we have explored making changes to the headline EBacc attainment measure (EBacc Average Point Score). We are pausing this work and the current EBacc APS will remain the headline EBacc attainment measure.”
The EBacc was created as a performance measure to incentivise schools to get more students to study a suite of academic subjects at GCSE.
For the latest education news and analysis delivered directly to your inbox every weekday morning, sign up to the Tes Daily newsletter
