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Jan 16, 2025 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson |Pupil demographics
In the first part of this article, we examined how national gaps in Progress 8 scores between disadvantaged pupils and their peers could be split into two parts, one based on within-school gaps and the other based on between-school gaps. In this second part, we look at how these gaps vary by region. Once again, we use published school-level Key Stage 4 data for 2024. Part one gives details about how we split the Progress 8 gap between and within schools at a national level.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson |Pupil demographics
In this article I’m going to examine the extent to which national attainment gaps between disadvantaged pupils and their peers varies within and between schools. In part two I will examine how these vary by region. The “within school” part of the gap refers to the fact that even in the same school disadvantaged pupils tend to achieve lower outcomes than their peers.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson
His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools raised concerns about “the number of children whose pattern of education is disjointed” in his first annual report. This seemed to cover pupils who attended school only part-time for whatever reason, including both flexi-schooling and when pupils have particular needs (e.g. medical conditions). Before September, pupils on part-time timetables would have been marked in attendance registers as absent when not attending schools and present when attending.
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Dec 12, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Mike Fischer |Eliza Hilton |Dave Thomson
Last month we published a report on Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) using data we collected using our Reading Assessment Programme (RAP). Following this, we were interested to see how fluency mapped onto the work we did on early literacy and the segmentation of Key Stage 1 (KS1) literacy scores by gender, season of birth, and disadvantage[1].
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson
The Department for Education (DfE) have finally published their long-awaited Key Stage 4 statistical first release (SFR) today. This includes provisional Progress 8 (P8) data for all state-funded schools for what could be the last time. It certainly won’t be published next year or the year after due to the cancellation of Key Stage 2 tests (the baseline measure for P8) during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Much attention will no doubt be paid to the schools at the top of P8 rankings.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Eliza Hilton |Paul Charman |Natasha Plaister |Dave Thomson
Over the last few years, colleagues at FFT have been developing the Reading Assessment Programme (RAP), a simple online assessment tool to assess pupils on GPC[1] accuracy, decoding accuracy and reading fluency. Between September 2022 and August 2024, a total of 110,000 pupils from almost 700 schools have completed 340,000+ assessments.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson |Pupil demographics
Regular readers will know that we’ve been trying to monitor the rate of exclusions and suspensions in schools in advance of official statistics from the Department of Education. We last looked at this at the end of the Spring Term in 2024. We now look at the full academic year 2023/24. By contrast, the most recent (at the time of writing) official statistics for exclusions and suspensions, published in July 2023, relate to the 2022/23 academic year.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson
The start of the school year saw the introduction of new statutory guidance for schools in relation to recording and managing attendance (and absence). Briefly, this saw the introduction of some new absence codes for use in schools’ registers and changes to definition of some existing codes. We’ll unpack these as we go along. We use data for September 2023 and September 2024 collected from around 9,000 schools subscribing to FFT Attendance Tracker.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
localogy.com | Dave Thomson
In the aftermath of a Google algorithm update, the immediate impact on client sites can be tough to measure (especially with an update as volatile as the core update Google just rolled out in August). While Google core updates are unfortunately unavoidable, having a solid game plan to follow in the wake of one is the best way to set up clients for success.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Dave Thomson
In this article we return to earlier work in which we examined attainment in literacy from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2 to GCSE. Briefly, this work tracked how the attainment of pupils changed over time, identifying key benchmarks at each Key Stage that corresponded with a high probability of achieving grade 4 or above in GCSE English language. We also examined variation in attainment over time for groups of pupils defined by gender, disadvantage and term of birth.
