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1 month ago | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister |Pupil demographics
Here at Datalab, we’re nothing if not innovative.[1] And so when we heard about some recent work from researchers at the University of Glasgow that uses the new (to us) method of latent class analysis to explore links between attainment, exclusions and attendance in Scotland, we thought we’d see what insights it could offer us into low attaining Key Stage 4 pupils in England. Latent class analysis is a way of identifying groups of people with similar characteristics or behaviour.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Regular readers might be aware that before I joined Datalab, I was at the Institute of Physics. And one of our most quoted stats back then – taken from the It’s Different for Girls report – was that 49% of state-funded mixed sex schools send no girls at all on to do A-Level physics. That report was published more years ago than I care to remember, so I thought it would be interesting to update that statistic, and to take a look at the situation for some other subjects.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
In this post I’ll be returning to a favourite topic: the choices that students make at Key Stage 5. I’ve looked at how these vary by gender, ethnicity, disadvantage (and so on) in previous posts, but one area I’ve neglected is how these interact with one another.
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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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Aug 18, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Results for GCSEs are out on Thursday. We will, of course, be publishing analysis on the day. If you don’t want to miss it, why not sign up now to receive our blogposts as they come out? As we gear up for results day, we’ve put together this post detailing things that we’ll be looking out for on the day. For the last few years, following the cancellation of public exams in 2020 and 2021, grading has been the biggest story on GCSE results day.
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Aug 11, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Results for Level 3 qualifications, including A-Levels and T-Levels, are out later this week. As ever, we’ll be posting analysis of the main trends on the day. If you want to make sure you don’t miss anything, you can sign up now to receive our analysis as it comes out. But in the meantime, we’ve put together this preview post rounding up everything that we’ll be looking out for on the day. For the last few years, the biggest headlines around A-Levels have all been about grading.
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Jul 9, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Academies were first established by the Labour government led by Tony Blair, way back in 2000. Since then, successive governments have enthusiastically encouraged academisation, and Labour are now inheriting a very different landscape to that when they were last in power. So this seems like an opportune moment to take stock of the current state of play for academisation and multi-academy trusts.
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May 12, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
For once the title question I’ve chosen for this blogpost is one that I can actually answer. The answer is yes. That was a short post. But, alas, I’m not really letting you get away just yet. There’s plenty more to say on the subject. Pupils in single sex schools do indeed get better grades, on average, than those in mixed schools – the average Attainment 8 score for pupils in state-funded single sex schools was 59.0 last year, compared to 46.3 for pupils in mixed schools.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Here at Datalab, we’re often prompted to write new posts based on the insightful comments and awkward questions that readers post in the blog’s comments section. This post is actually based on my attempts to answer an awkward question from one of my Datalab colleagues, but here’s hoping it prompts even more questions and comments to keep us going with ideas for future posts.
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Schools Week recently wrote about the case of The Diocese of Bristol Academies Trust (DBAT). This 15 school trust is closing its doors after its sole secondary school was rebrokered following an inadequate Ofsted rating. The trust’s CEO was quoted as saying that trusts with a high number of primaries and low number of secondaries were exposed to “a vulnerability”. With , the funding models for trusts in this position may be based around reliance on their secondary schools’ numbers.
