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School accountability: why multi-year measures would be fairer to everyone and how they could be implemented

By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 29 November 2019

John Jerrim.

School league tables produced every year by the Department for Education currently use a single year of test score data in the headline measure. Based upon how a school’s most recent cohort of Year 11’s performed on their GCSEs, schools get labelled with terms such as “above” and “below” average.

This is not a smart thing to do. It would be much better to use the average performance of a school across multiple years instead.

This blog recaps the reasons why – and then suggests how this could be done.

(more…)