Later this week the Department for Education (DfE) will publish provisional Progress 8 measures for secondary schools for the first time in two years.
Quite how much we will be able to read into measures of school performance given the differential effects of the pandemic on attendance is questionable.
That is on top of existing issues with the measures that we’ve written about here and here [1]
Even then, Progress 8 scores for most schools aren’t that different.
Despite all of that, we still think that Progress 8 isn’t a bad measure. Clearly it’s not perfect. But it is much more equitable to pupils than threshold measures of raw attainment – such as the percentage of pupils achieving 5 or more A*-C grades including English and maths, the dominant measure prior to its introduction.
