Today the government has published the latest data on secondary school performance. This is, of course, the first time that performance data has been published at school level since before the pandemic.
The government is being cautious about reading too much into the published measures of performance this year. They have even renamed their website from compare school performance to find school performance data. We know that the disruption caused by the pandemic varied hugely between schools – we’ve written extensively about the effects on attendance, for example.
So this year’s Progress 8 scores may be more useful as a proxy for how much disruption schools faced than as a measure of school performance.
Having said all that, let’s see what we can learn from today’s release.
