The government won’t publish data on primary school pupil progress next year or in 2025 because there are no key stage 1 SATs results to provide a baseline.
The Department for Education confirmed the decision in a guidance update today.
Progress is normally based on a comparison between key stage 1 and key stage 2 SATs results. But key stage 1 SATs were cancelled along with all other school tests in 2020 and 2021.
The DfE said that “given the lack of a statistically robust alternative baseline to calculate primary progress measures, we will not be producing or publishing primary progress measures for 2023-24 and 2024-25”.
Government will “instead will only publish the usual attainment measures…for these years”.
These include the proportion of pupils achieving the ‘expected standard’ and the higher standard in reading, writing and maths and pupils’ average scaled scores.
Ministers considered using the early years foundation stage profile, phonics screening check and times tables test as an alternative baseline, “but we concluded that these all had statistical issues which made them unsuitable”.
However, the DfE said it intends to “return to producing progress measures using KS1 assessments in 2025-26 and 2026-27, ahead of the introduction of reception baseline assessment-KS2 progress measures from 2027-28”.
The guidance also confirms that the DfE will resume publishing primary test data at school level on the performance measures website for this academic year. Because of the pandemic, no school-level data has been published since 2019.
The DfE “intend to present the 2022-23 performance measures in a broadly similar way to prior to the pandemic, for example, with comparison tables for schools, local authorities and multi-academy trusts”.
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