Natasha Plaister

3 weeks ago | ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Natasha Plaister

A few months back, I wrote a piece about intersectionality and Key Stage 5 subject choice, and promised to write a series getting into different subject areas in more depth. That series is now upon us, and I’m starting with a look at STEM subjects. Lack of diversity in those studying STEM subjects is an issue that’s widely discussed – and we’ve touched on it in some of our posts on subject choice. But what we haven’t written about is how these areas interact with one another.

1 month 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.

2 months 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.

Mar 18, 2025 | 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.

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.