Tracking Progress and Evaluating Impact for Current Year 10 and Year 11 Students

26th September 2024

Dealing with no Progress 8 and only Attainment Measures

Earlier this year, the Department for Education announced that, in the absence of KS2 prior attainment data for the current Year 10 and year 11 students, there would be “no replacement to Progress 8 for 2024/25 and 2025/26.”

The DfE has confirmed that the other performance measures, such as Attainment 8 and the ‘Basics’, will still be published in 2025 and 2026.

This has two obvious consequences:

  1. This summer’s P8 score will live with you until your unvalidated Progress 8 is calculated in October 27, based on that summer’s KS4 results for current Y8.
  2. As only attainment data will be published based on 2025 and 2026 results, this places KS4 schools in the position that your results will be evaluated on the basis of raw attainment data alone.

In his blog earlier this year, my colleague John Philip reviewed how best to tackle the issue of how can schools continue to set appropriate aspirations for your Y10 and Y11 students and measure the progress they are making?

In this blog, I will run through the analysis we recommend that you could and should be considering for your Y10 and Y11 students over the next couple of years.

Attainment 8

Following a number of years of turbulence in examination result profiles, key attainment outcomes over the last two years have returned to being broadly in line with those seen in 2019.

On the basis that, for many schools, the prior attainment of student cohorts don’t vary substantively from one year to the next, comparing current Year 10 and Year 11 Attainment 8 scores with those from the last two years’ cohorts, particularly when placed alongside P8 scores for these cohorts, will provide a useful benchmark against which current standards can be compared.

You can easily track progress at both a cohort and student level in terms of the key KS4 Attainment Measures in Alps Connect.

Fig 1. Example of analysis of key cohort attainment measures

 

Fig 2. Example of Student level analysis for students achieving English and maths at Grade 4

You can also view your subject level analysis, to enable your subject leaders and teachers to track attainment in more detail.

Fig 3. Example of Subject level attainment analysis

 

But, how to track progress without P8?

Over the next two years, the Connect platform will still allow you to create indicative P8 scores, if you add in a proxy KS2 score for your students. How you arrive at your proxy KS2 score will depend on your own systems. One option is to use either CAT4 or MiDYIS scores, see here for more detail. Alternatively, we have developed a new cohort distribution model which colleagues at PiXL recently shared at their 2024 summer term conference for those schools without CAT4 data, more detail here.

The Alps Bonus – You Get More Than P8!

At Alps, we have our own progress indicator – the famous Alps Quality Indicator (“QI”). Like P8, this is a measure of progress across the curriculum but crucially, unlike P8, it includes all subjects – rather than just the best 8, and also treats all subject equally – without any weighting. The QI score is a pure indicator that easily and clearly identifies the subjects that are performing well, or those that may need additional attention going forward. I would highly recommend, during the fallow P8 years, giving the QI indicator a go. Our analysis of Alps provider data over the last 2 years indicates that schools using Alps are more likely to have a positive progress 8 score and early indicators are that this will be the case for this year as well.

End note from Alps

If you do not use Alps currently, and would like to find out more about tracking progress for your current Year 10 and Year 11 students, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.

We currently work with over 1,200 schools and colleges and 95 Groups and MATS in the UK and internationally, offering our high-quality analysis at both KS4 and KS5.

You can also call us on 01484 887600 and we will be delighted to speak to you, or you can book a demo at a time convenient for you with one of our knowledgeable team.

About the author: Dr Jevon Hirst, Alps Training Director

Jevon has over 20 years’ experience working in education. Prior to joining Alps in 2020, Jevon has worked in a number of senior leadership roles within schools, with responsibilities for teaching, learning, curriculum, strategic planning, self-evaluation and student achievement. Central to these roles, has been the intelligent use of data to inform school improvement and maximise outcomes for students.

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