Toby Young Toby Young

Free schools top the league tables – again

According to data released by the Department for Education today, free schools have topped the league table when it comes to Progress 8. This metric, introduced three years ago, tells you how much progress children have made in a particular school between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to the progress other children have made with similar starting points. It’s a way of controlling for the fact that children enter secondary school with varying levels of prior attainment. If you just look at raw GCSE data, those schools that get the best results might not be the most effective; it could be that they’re attracting children of above average ability. Indeed, it nearly always is due to that. Progress 8 is a fairer measure because it assesses a school’s GCSE results after taking into account both prior attainment and the average progress made by all children with the same prior attainment.

Anyway, according to this measure – which must be the fairest way of judging schools ever devised by the Department for Education – free schools are outperforming all other types of schools.

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