Primary School Accountability in 2023
If you have used the Compare-School-Performance website recently, you may have noticed that the 2022 progress figures have disappeared. These were uploaded a few months ago (albeit with a big warning not to use them too much), after years of having to rely on the 2019 data that predated the pandemic.
Why the 2022 data has disappeared has now become apparent, with the government publishing Primary school accountability in 2022: a technical guide. This makes it clear that, years on, we are still feeling the impact of Covid on assessments and school accountability.
Much of the document confirms what we already knew, but it is useful to have it all in one officially-endorsed place. Some key points are:
- While the Compare-School-Performance website will not have your data, it does still appear in your secure Analyse School Performance (ASP) computer program
- This data will still be shared with Ofsted through the Inspection Data Summary Report (IDSR) and (in Ofsted’s words) it will form a “starting point only” for their inspection
- The data will also be shared with DfE officials to (among other things) help them make decisions about funding for teaching schools and core subject ‘hubs’, and inform their decisions on free school applications.
From an academy trust perspective, the document reiterates the government’s wish to produce the KS2 MAT performance measures. However:
- These measures will not be published, and will only be accessible through the secure portal, View Your Education Data (VYED)
- Not all MATs will receive data, nor will a MAT’s data necessarily cover all their schools, because some of the schools may have academised since 2019, or joined the trust since 2019
- MAT data will not be published for special schools, pupil referral units, alternative provision academies, and alternative provision free schools
- Sponsor-level data will no longer be reported
The 2021-2022 data for schools and MATs may be available, but the government is keen for us to be cautious about how we use it:
- We should not share individual progress data with pupils or parents (“Progress is calculated for individual pupils solely in order to calculate the school’s overall progress scores”). We are encouraged to share individual attainment data instead
- We are advised not to make “direct comparisons” between 2022 data and that of previous years
- We are advised not to compare our school to national or local authority averages, or to other schools
KS2 progress is calculated using a KS1 baseline, but those baselines did not take place in 2020 and 2021. This means there is currently no firm plan to publish progress measures for those cohorts when they finish KS2 (which is this summer and next summer). The government says it will
“explore… alternative options for producing primary progress measures in the affected years, and will announce our approach in due course.”
The document’s remaining pages explain how the measures and calculations are made, including for instance:
- how NC teacher assessment bands (KS1) and P-Levels are converted into point score equivalents
- what the APS scores are for each prior attainment group
- what happens when data is missing; what happens when a child has an “extremely negative” score
- how “confidence intervals” are calculated
- how “progress” is calculated for each pupil in Y6
