We want the nation’s children to be taught by teachers who are passionate experts in the subject they teach. There is widespread concern that many children are taught science and maths by teachers without an academic degree in the subject. This shortage is most acutely felt in physics, with large numbers of unfilled teacher training [...]
We have an accountability system that has encouraged schools to check that children are making a certain number of sub-levels of progress each year. This is the basis on which headteachers monitor (and now pay) teachers and on which Ofsted judges schools. Yet there is little hard science underpinning the system in use: take a [...]
This Government has invested enormous amounts of money and political capital in closing the attainment gap between children from low-income families, and everyone else. They give schools a pupil premium for children eligible for free school meals (and some other vulnerable groups) now worth £1300 for primary pupils and £935 for secondary pupils. They gave [...]
Attainment 8 and Progress 8, the new Key Stage Four school accountability measures due to be introduced by Government in 2016, will undoubtedly make a difference to how schools enter their pupils for qualifications. They are reminiscent of the old 'best eight or capped' and 'contextual value added' measures in that they judge a school [...]
It is actually quite hard to say anything about the causal impact of grammar schools. There is no such thing as selective and non-selective areas: 1 in 5 grammar school students cross over a local authority border on the way to school. And perhaps as many as 1 in 5 grammar school students were not in [...]
It's not uncommon to hear schools express a view that the attainment of their intake is systematically over estimated or 'inflated' in some way. Schools are not accusing another of cheating; simply that high stakes accountability pushes teachers to ensure children achieve the best result possible. And where a feeder school outperforms expectations for an [...]
This evening we launch Education Datalab with a report ‘Seven things you might not know about our schools'. Rich data on our schools has been available for over a decade now but, as we hope this report shows, there is still much we can learn. Every piece of analysis we show in this report is [...]
