From: Head of Data, Department for Education
Sent: 23 August 2018 13:31
To: Headteachers (ALL)
Subject: Happy Progress 8 Day!
Dear everyone,
Hope you’ve had a good morning with your young people seeing their amazing/all right/distinctly-average/career-ending [Sue, please delete as appropriate and send to the relevant Headteacher email list; please try not to send it to the “All” list again] results and finding out how [well they’ve done/will have done once you’ve demanded remarks from the exam board].
We especially hope, in this age of focusing on all students, that you’ve had the chance to speak with those students who will be spending the next year doing re-sits until they once again get the same result.
Anyway, here at the department, we exist to help you, or at least we exist and we occasionally help you, and we thought a guide on how to calculate Progress 8 might be useful. Also, the TES has done one and it makes us look bad that we didn’t think to get something out to you. So please see below:
DfE “Cheat Sheet”: How to calculate Progress 8
1) Take your GCSE results (or as many of your GCSE results as you plausibly can’t get rid of - see “Cheat Sheet: Actual Cheating” for more on this).
2) Bury them at a crossroads at midnight on a moonless eve beneath a sprig of rosemary. (*If you are allergic to rosemary, approved alternatives include basil, garlic or a live cat - puppies were previously permitted but see recent work from Defra on this.)
3) Circle the buried object three times widdershins, chanting “Gibbous Goveus, bless us with our approv-ed progress”. Please ensure you get the rhythm right for this, otherwise we get complaints from ministers.
4) Leave for eight weeks before digging up and returning whatever is left to the department, where a number will be duly plucked out of the air based on the same random algorithm that determines MAT CEO pay.
5) PLEASE NOTE: FOR INTERNAL REASONS, THE NUMBER GENERATED BY STEP 4 WILL BE WRONG. Don’t worry - although this will later be blamed on you, there is nothing whatsoever you can do about it.
Final note on this: do please try to fabricate a Progress 8 number for your local newspaper today - you’ve no chance of getting it right, but we do have an internal sweepstake on which school will produce once furthest from the truth.
We welcome feedback, and complaints about this system should be addressed to your nearest recycling centre.
The author, who prefers to remain anonymous, is a teacher in London and not, in fact, a senior civil servant
