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2 weeks ago | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
Regular readers will know that here at Datalab we’re always interested in the subject choices that students make. So when the Bank of England approached us about putting together a report taking a deep dive into trends in the study of economics, we jumped at the chance. We looked at trends over the last ten years at GCSE, A-Level and first degree level, focusing in on the school and pupil characteristics that are most – and least – associated with studying economics.
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3 weeks ago | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that the pandemic brought some disruption to education. Aside from many other things, it led to the cancellation of public exams in 2020 and 2021, and grades being awarded through CAGs and TAGs respectively. And, of course, we saw an increase in top grades at GCSE in both years, as well as in 2022 when grade boundaries were adjusted to avoid too sharp a fall in grading.
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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.
