Navigating the GCSE to A-Level Transition: Overcoming Challenges and Succeeding in Advanced Education
10/07/23
02/09/17
Progress 8 / Attainment 8:
A pupil and parent guide
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If you’re tuned into educational policy, you may have heard the buzzwords Attainment 8 or Progress 8 surrounding schools lately, but have no idea what they mean. With the entire examinations system in upheaval, that’s no surprise, so we’ve put together a short guide to these new measures of school and pupil performance.
Attainment 8
As you’re hopefully aware, the GCSE gradings system is changing from letters to numbers. If this is news to you, please check our comprehensive guide on the new 9-1 system first.
While the summer 2017 exams will only award numbers for maths and english (leaving this solitary year of pupils with a confusing hodge-podge of results), the rest of the subjects plan to follow in summer 2018.
One disadvantage of the soon-to-be-extinct letter grades is that it’s tough to perform mathematical operations on them. For example, who would you say has achieved better, Pupil X achieving 8 C grades or Pupil Y achieving A*, A, B, B, C, C, E, G? (Answer below)
Not so with numbers! As you can imagine, handed a set of number gradings, the first thing pupils will do on results day is to add up their total score and compare with their friends.
And while the pupils are frantically totting up their totals on an individual basis, schools and governments will be doing likewise (perhaps even more eager to make comparisons than the pupils). Attainment 8 is essentially the set of rules by which they will be making these additions…
How Attainment 8 is calculated
Attainment 8 is calculated by adding up the scores from your best 8 qualifying subjects. These subjects fit into three groups:
Group 1: Your best English grade, and one Maths grade
Group 2: Three grades from EBacc subjects
Group 3: Three grades from any other subjects
Notes on Group 1
For many years, the headline figure for school performance has been the number of pupils achieving 5+ A*-C grades inc. Maths and English, successfully putting a huge emphasis on the need to pass these two key subjects, but inadvertently creating a very ‘binary’ pass/fail line on the English & Maths C/D borderline – with the effect that schools have been pouring time and money into pushing pupils over this boundary.
The importance of Maths and English is respected under the new system by double counting the scores in these subjects – however pushing a pupil from a 8 grade up to a 9 will be equally beneficial to a school as helping a pupil up from a 3 to a 4.
Notes on Group 2
Grades from 3 EBaac subjects will count towards group 2. These can be any of:
- Any science (up to 3 if separate Biology, Chemistry and Physics exams are taken)
- Computer Science
- History and/or Geography
- Any Langauges
Notes on Group 3
Any remaining GCSEs or approved academic, arts or vocational qualifications will count towards group 3. One of these is likely to be the pupil’s second English result. The mathematically savvy reader will already have noted that with grades awarded from 9-1, and with the doubling of Group 1 grades, the maximum score for a pupil is therefore 10 x 9 = 90.
Progress 8
In order to measure how well a school helps a child to progress from KS2 (at the end of primary) to KS4 (GCSE’s), each child will be allocated* an expected ATTAINMENT 8 score, based on their performance in their year 6 English and Maths SATs.
*We use the word ‘allocated’ rather than ‘given’ as pupils will not be told this score in advance. In fact, neither will schools. The calculation will be performed after the exams have been sat, utilising national progress averages.
A pupil’s progress, which can be either positive (good) or negative (bad), will be measured as:
Pupils will not be individually told their Progress 8 score, however on a macro level, schools will be awarded an average Progress 8 score calculated as a mean of the whole year group.
- A positive score shows a school’s pupils are making above average progress
- A negative score shows a school’s pupils are making below average progress
- A school falling below the ‘floor standard’ of -0.5 will be likely to fall under scrutiny by inspection
- A school with a Progress 8 score above +1.0 will be exempt from routine Ofsted inspections for the following school year
Our thoughts on the new measures
In essence, Progress 8 is nothing more than a development of the current Value Added measure. However, as it is being brought in together with a change in the awarding of grades, it’s primed to become the key measure by which schools are judged, replacing the current 5+ A*-C including english and maths.
The main issue with the current measure is the huge emphasis that is placed on the C/D borderline. Imagine this from a school’s point of view – if given a year group of 100 pupils, half of which are sitting on a grade D but could get a C with a little help, while the other half are sitting on a grade B but could be pushed to achieve an A. It is only natural that the school would seek to improve their ratings by helping the bottom half over that hurdle, potentially giving the school a 100% a*-c pass rate, while those comfortably on a grade B are left to try and improve on their own, as they are already ‘in the bank’ in terms of the school’s most significant result.
Under the new system, schools set to benefit equally by increasing a pupil’s grade, regardless of the pupil’s starting point on the scale. This should hopefully lead to a better appropriation of Pupil Premium financing to target the specific pupils who deserve the additional support.
If you’ve any questions related to the new measures, please feel free to email johnny@manningstutors.co.uk, or call 0207 060 6357.
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Answer to above pupil comparison
Earlier we posed the question, who is better, pupil X achieving 8 C grades or Pupil Y achieving A*, A, B, B, C, C, E, G. And the answer is… it depends!
Let’s take a look at the conversion of these old grades into the new 9-1 grades. For pupil X, an old grade C may correspond to a new grade 4 or 5, depending on whether they achieved a weak or a strong C. Therefore, their attainment 8 score would be somewhere between 40 and 50
Equally for pupil Y, there’s no direct matching of the grades, depending on where within each boundary they achieved will create a different 9-1 conversion. Furthermore, which grades get doubled for maths and english will affect the final result. Here we look at their minimum / maximum possibilities.
| Pupil Y Grade | Minimum 9–1 Grade | Maximum 9–1 Grade |
| A* | 8 | 8 (in Maths, doubled to 18) |
| A | 7 | 8 (in English Lit, doubled to 16) |
| B | 5 | 6 |
| B | 5 | 6 |
| C | 4 | 5 |
| C | 4 (in English Lit, doubled to 8) | 5 |
| E | 4 (in English Lang | 3 |
| G | 1 (in Maths, doubled to 2) | 1 |
| Attainment 8 Score | 41 | 60 |