This year sees the return of external exams. For Key Stage 4, it also sees the return of published accountability measures.

DfE had already stated that no results from 2020 or 2021 would count in any external measure of school performance. This left the question of how qualifications taken by current Year 11 pupils over the past two years would be treated.

In March we got our answer (pdf): qualifications entered in 2020 or 2021 will count as entries but not as results. Effectively, through an accountability lens, any qualification taken in 2020 or 2021 is treated as a U. It receives zero points but counts as an entry. Full details of the methodology were released earlier this week.

To get a handle on the possible impact of this approach, I’ll apply the 2022 rules to 2019’s end of Key Stage 4 cohort, and calculate the change in Attainment 8[1]. (2019 because that’s the last time we had external exams.)

Early entry scenarios

There are lots of reasons why schools and pupils choose to enter exams before the end of Year 11. For this post, I’ll model three scenarios, reflecting some of the most common[2]. Namely where:

  1. Strong mathematicians enter maths in Year 9 or 10 to allow them to concentrate on other subjects (often other maths qualifications) in Year 10 and/or 11
  2. Whole cohorts of pupils enter English literature or language at the end of Year 10
  3. Fluent speakers of languages other than English enter a qualification in that language at some point before Year 11.

To quantify the relative impact of each of these scenarios, I’ll re-calculate 2019’s Attainment 8 if 2022’s rules are applied only to early entries in:

  1. Maths
  2. English language and English literature
  3. Modern foreign languages (MFL)
  4. Maths, English literature, English language and MFL

Then I’ll apply 2022’s rules to all subjects to see the overall impact.

Results

 

The first thing to notice is that 2019’s national Attainment 8 score doesn’t change very much. Even when 2022’s rules are applied to all subjects, it only drops from 47.84 to 47.51. A change of -0.33. Of that small change, early entries in English are responsible for the biggest portion, then maths, then MFL.

When we look at school type, the size of the overall change is roughly the same, but the contribution of early entries in the different subjects is different. In selective schools, most of the change in Attainment 8 is due to early entries in maths, while in non-selective schools it’s English. And English, the main contributor in non-selective schools, has no impact in selective schools at all.

Distribution of schools

Nationally, then, applying 2022’s rules to 2019’s Attainment 8 doesn’t make too much difference. But what about for individual schools?

 

 

Overall, 40% of mainstream schools saw no change and a further 49% of schools saw a drop of less than one point. So, in total, 89% of schools saw little or no change.

However, some schools did see big drops. 41 schools saw their scores fall by at least 5 points.

Below, we calculate the average percentage of early entries for schools in each of the above brackets.

In general, we’d expect schools with bigger changes in Attainment 8 score to have a greater proportion of early entries, and we see that this is indeed the case. Pupils in schools whose score didn’t change at all sat 2.1% of their exam entries before 2019, compared with 28.4% in schools whose score dropped by at least 5 points.

It might seem counterintuitive that schools whose Attainment 8 score stayed the same should have had any early entries at all. This is simply a result of the way Attainment 8 is calculated. In these schools, either the results achieved in exams entered early weren’t included in pupils’ Attainment 8 scores anyway (generally because of better results in other subjects) or they were but pupils had at least one other result from an exam taken in 2019 which could count instead.

What will happen in the summer?

Applying 2022’s rules to 2019’s Attainment 8 has little impact, nationally. But a big impact for a number of individual schools.

However, many schools will have changed their entry patterns since 2019. For example, a school that usually enters all of its pupils for English literature at the end of Year 10 might not have done so last year, either because pupils had missed so much of the course due to absence or because staff were overloaded with Year 11 TAGs. Or both.

This means that the impact we’ve found in this post will be different to the impact we’ll observe this summer. Still, it seems that schools who entered lots of pupils for exams in Year 9 or 10 might have good reason to be a little nervous.

Notes

[1] One of the main Key Stage 4 accountability measures – see here for details

[2] I’ve not included statistics here, one of the subjects most commonly entered early, because reformed statistics qualifications (i.e. graded 9-1 rather than A*-G) only became available in 2019. So any statistics qualifications taken before 2019 were already excluded from performance tables.

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