Progress 8 and the EBacc: how schools are actually judged

Since 2016, the headline measure by which England's secondary schools are judged has not been how many pupils pass their GCSEs but how far each pupil travels. Progress 8 compares every child's results at 16 with the results achieved nationally by pupils who left primary school with the same Key Stage 2 scores in reading and maths. A school full of high attainers gets no automatic credit for glossy raw grades; a school in a difficult catchment can sit near the top of the tables by moving its intake further than statistically similar children moved elsewhere. That was the point: the old benchmark, five A* to C grades including English and maths, rewarded schools for the pupils they admitted rather than the teaching they did.

The arithmetic runs through a companion measure called Attainment 8, which scores eight qualification slots per pupil. English and maths are double weighted and occupy the first four slots. Three more are reserved for subjects from the English Baccalaureate list — the sciences, computer science, history, geography and languages — and the final three are open to any approved qualification, including arts and vocational courses. Each grade converts to points, the pupil's total is compared with the national average for their prior-attainment group, and the school's Progress 8 score is the mean of those gaps. Zero means exactly average progress; a score of +1 means pupils averaged a grade higher in every subject than similar children nationally; anything below -0.5 is officially "well below average" and invites Department for Education intervention, up to and including a forced change of academy trust.

The EBacc itself is a separate lever. League tables report the percentage of pupils entered for, and achieving, the full combination of English, maths, sciences, a humanity and a language. Ministers set an ambition for 75 per cent of pupils to be entered by 2022 and 90 per cent by 2025, targets that were never approached: national entry has hovered around 40 per cent for years, held down mainly by the collapse in language take-up. Even unmet, the target does work. Ofsted inspectors ask school leaders to justify low EBacc entry, so the pressure operates through inspection as much as through the tables.

What the measure does to the timetable

A structure that reserves five of eight slots for English, maths and EBacc subjects, and double weights two of them, decides what a school can afford to offer. Options systems have been rebuilt so that most pupils take history or geography whether or not they want to, and the subjects competing for the three open slots have withered. GCSE entries in design and technology have fallen by more than two thirds since 2010; music, drama and media studies have all declined while EBacc entries held up. Heads do not need instructing to do this. Staffing follows the accountability measure, so a subject that cannot fill a bucket loses its specialist teachers, and the choice disappears for the next cohort.

Which children get the attention

The old five A*-to-C measure produced notorious triage: pupils on the C/D borderline received intensive intervention while secure passes and likely fails were left alone. Progress 8 was designed to end that, because every grade of every pupil now moves the school's score. In practice the double weighting of English and maths keeps the spotlight on the grade 4/5 boundary in those two subjects, and the averaging creates a darker incentive at the bottom. A pupil who sits no exams scores heavily negative across all eight slots, enough to drag a small school's published figure on their own, which is why researchers at the Education Policy Institute linked the measure to off-rolling — pupils vanishing from rolls before the January census of Year 11, after which their results no longer count. The DfE responded in 2018 by capping the most extreme individual scores, and Ofsted now investigates unusual exit patterns.

There is a quieter distributional problem too. FFT Education Datalab has shown repeatedly that Progress 8 correlates with disadvantage: long-term poor pupils make less progress on average wherever they are taught, so schools serving deprived coastal and northern towns cluster at the bottom of a table that claims to have adjusted for intake. Prior attainment at 11 captures ability, not circumstance. The Northern Powerhouse Partnership and several academy trusts have argued for a contextualised version, and the DfE publishes disadvantage-gap data alongside the headline score, but the number that appears in local newspapers, estate agents' particulars and Ofsted's pre-inspection briefing remains the uncontextualised one. A measure built to be fairer than raw results still decides reputations, and it does so with the same false precision.