2019/11/15 by George Leckie, Leckie, George, Lucy Prior +3
Social Sciences · #Applications (stat.AP) #Early Childhood Education and Development #Education Systems and Policy #FOS: Computer and information sciences #School Choice and Performance
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1911.06884
openalex publication_date 2019/11/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In England, Progress 8 is the Conservative government's headline secondary school performance and accountability measure. Progress 8 attempts to measure the average academic progress pupils make in each school between their KS2 tests and their GCSE Attainment 8 examinations. The Labour opposition recently announced they would scrap the KS2 tests were they to be elected. Such a move, however, would preclude the publication of Progress 8 and would leave schools to be compared in terms of their average Attainment 8 scores or, at best, their Attainment 8 scores only adjusted for school differences in pupil demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. In this paper, we argue and illustrate empirically that this best-case scenario of an 'Adjusted Attainment 8' measure would prove less fair and meaningful than Progress 8 and therefore a backwards step, especially when Progress 8 itself has been criticised as biased against schools teaching educationally disadvantaged intakes.