When I wrote about reforming accountability measures a few months ago, I promised I’d follow up by explaining why I don’t support any methods for ranking schools from the very worst to the very best, regardless of whether it is an attainment measure, a value-added or ‘progress’ measure or some sort of voodoo ‘contextual value-added’ …
This is a follow-up to my earlier blog 'Nobody Knows Which Schools Are Good'. I'd recommend reading it first. It is the 21st of May 2024, the biggest night of the year for state-funded schools in England. Tonight is the night when headteachers find out how they will be judged this summer. The great and …
This is the first part of the talk I gave at researchED London 2019. It is almost entirely based on work I completed with Dave Thomson at FFT Education Datalab. All the smart bits are his and the errors are mine! Have you ever read so much and thought about something so hard, that you …
Last week, Ed Dorrell wrote a strange editorial in TES called ‘Why attaching excluded pupils' results to their school won't work'. I say it was strange because he failed to address the major impediment to including off-rolled pupils in accountability metrics (i.e. finding them... for that, read on). There is no doubt that there are …
Schools-datajournogenius Christopher Cook of the FT wrote a nice blog post this week showing how forcing academy conversion for low performing schools probably wouldn't do much to fix social inequalities in educational achievement. I agree. But I want to show some (quick and dirty) data to help keep alive the dreams of school reformers. This …
Continue reading The social mobility challenge is not impossible
This month the government is publishing school GCSE attainment data separately for groups of low (below L4 at KS2), middle (L4 at KS2) and high (above L4 at KS2) attaining pupils. This approach is to be commended and we recommended it in academic papers here and here because it provides information to parents on how a …
Continue reading Reporting GCSE performance by groups is fraught with problems
Becky Allen 