A so-called North-South divide in educational attainment can be accounted for by pupils’ background, new analysis suggests.

Dave Thomson, of FFT Education Datalab, has questioned a report published yesterday, which highlighted how the proportion of pupils in the North making below-average progress between primary schools and GCSE  is almost double that in the South.

Mr Thomson said that measuring school performance by Progress 8 does not take into account factors such as gender, disadvantage and ethnic background, which are known to impact on results. 

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In a new blogpost, he said that an analysis of progress made once a school’s context had been taken into account shows that actually there is not much difference between the school performance of local authority areas in the North East and London.

Progress 8: A North-South divide in schools?

The FFT Datalab analysis shows that once pupils’ context has been taken into account:

• Scores for local authorities in the North East all improve.
• Scores for local authorities in London tend to fall.
   

The analysis also shows that there are some London local authorities that have a higher contextualised P8 score than the highest-scoring LA in the North East, but there are also some with lower scores than the lowest scoring areas in the North East.

Mr Thomson also questioned former Ofsted chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw’s claim in yesterday’s report in The Sunday Times that pupils in the North are no different to those he taught in London 10 years ago.

In the blogpost, Mr Thomson said: “Wilshaw claims that ‘these kids [in Northern schools] are not different from the kids I taught in London 10 years ago but they are not in good schools with good leaders’.”

“The first part is certainly questionable. The second part may be true, but evidence other than attainment data would be needed to support it.”