One of the Steel City’s secondaries is among the best in the whole country, while others are sadly lagging behind.
The country’s ‘Progress 8’ scores, which the Department of Education use to make ‘league tables’ of England’s schools each year, were due to be published on October 24.
However, this was pushed back after schools nationwide found errors in their key stage 4 & 5 results data caused by technical problems.
Now, they will instead by published on November 7.
It also means parents who wanted to wait until they saw the scores to pick a secondary school - the deadline for which is October 31 - will not be able to do so.
Progress 8 scores are a measure for assessing schools based on how well pupils did in their KS2 results compared to the end of KS4 when they did their GCSEs. Positive scores would indicate that children did better than predicted as a result of their time at the school.
It comes as the Department for Education this year confirmed there will be no ‘Progress 8’ reports published for schools for the 2024/25 and 2025/26 academic years to acknowledge the potential impact of the pandemic. Primary tests were cancelled for pupils in Year 6 in the academic years 2019-20 and 2020-21 because of the pandemic - meaning there is no prior KS2 attainment data available to use as a baseline for Progress 8 calculations for students sitting their GCSEs in the next two years.
The system has been criticised as being open to bias due to catchment areas, entrance exams, or even how rich parents are. General secretary of the National Education Union, Daniel Kebede, this year called Progress 8 “fundamentally flawed,” that “no single score or measure could ever” describe what happens in a school, and that “ranking” them can lead to “inaccurate conclusions.”
It comes after figures show - if the Progress 8 scores are indeed used to ‘rank’ schools as Mr Kebede criticises - that Sheffield fell behind in its grades last year.
They show that, out of some 30 schools in Sheffield at the end of the 2022/23 academic year, just six are were considered as getting 'above average' progress - while an overall majority of 17 schools scored in the red as being 'below average' or 'well below average'.
Below, The Star has compiled and ranked all of Sheffield's secondary schools by their Progress 8 scores in 2022/2023.
Schools that did not have their Progress 8 scores published included Bradfield School, Sheffield High School, Seraphic School, Bethany School, Westfield School, Westbourne School and Becton School, as well as the vast majority of special schools.