If school league tables return in 2021 they should look like this

If performance tables return for the 2021 Year 6 and Year 11 cohorts, the Department for Education will face important questions regarding whether they can provide reliable and valid information about the “performance” of a school. This is because of the substantial amount of time children currently in Year 5 and Year 10 will have spent out of school in the recent past, with their learning over this period to a great extent outside of the control of schools.

Head teachers have already warned that it would be “unfair” to publish league tables based on headline exam results when “The education of the children taking these assessments has already been disrupted by the coronavirus lockdown, and it is likely that there will be further disruption next academic year”

We agree that it would be unfair to publish headline school performance measures based solely on the 2021 exams series. A better approach would be to take an average across at least two years, from the 2019 (pre-Covid) and 2021 cohorts.

We believe the current situation therefore strengthens the existing case for school performance measures based on multi-year averages.

In this short discussion paper Loic Menzies (CfEY) and Professor John Jerrim (UCL IOE) summarise their evolving thinking in relation to their proposed approach, drawing on a recent roundtable attended by leading academics and government officials.