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3 weeks ago | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | John Jerrim
All children have the right to education. They also have the right to feel safe at school. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case in England – particularly amongst teenage girls. My new academic working paper out today uses data from the TIMSS study to track the emotional engagement of young people before and after the pandemic. It also investigates changes in their engagement between Year 5 and Year 9. The results are stark.
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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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2 months ago | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | John Jerrim
Research has shown pupils compare themselves academically to their school peers. For those in grammar schools, this will mean comparing themselves against a disproportionate number of high-achieving pupils. Studies from the US have suggested that this may increase the academic pressure on young people who – in such a high-achieving environment – feel they need to “be the best of the best”.
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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 15, 2025 | 
ffteducationdatalab.org.uk | Katie Beynon
When we last looked at absence back in November, we found that there had been little change from the previous year at primary, and a slight reduction at secondary. In this post, we’ll see whether these patterns held for the rest of the term. With a full term of data under our belts, we’ll also take a more detailed look at persistent absence. As usual, data for this post comes from our FFT Attendance Tracker schools – around 6,000 primary and 2,500 secondary schools across England.
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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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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.