The Government has released the provision data for the 2023 GCSE examinations. Whilst this may still change before the final data is released, we are all looking to see how schools have performed. I’ve seen people sharing useful summaries of the best performing schools on X/Twitter. Schools with revolutionary cultures rank the highest (congratulations to all involved). As a school on an improvement journey, I wanted to see how we’d done in terms of improving our progress score, so I looked at the data set and found the following:
In England there are 3,490 schools that have appear in the data sets for 2022 and 2023 (I will compare 2019 and 2023 another day)
Of the schools that had results in 2022, 42 were no longer included in the 2023 data set. All but one of these had a score of around -2, so perhaps they have converted etc.
The school that had the biggest shift in results went from -2.94 in 2022 to 0.28 in 2023
The other schools in the top ten for most improved scores improved their progress score by between 1.97-1.45
An improvement of 1.45 would see a school ranking in the top ten nationally for improvement (congrats if this is you!)
To be in the top 100 schools this year for improvement, your school would have had to have seen an increase of 0.64 on last year’s results
To be in the top 200 schools this year for improvement, your school would have had to have seen an increase of 0.48 on last year’s results
To be in the top 300 schools this year for improvement, your school would have had to have seen an increase of 0.40 on last year’s results
Overall, the number of schools who made a positive improvement to their progress scores looks like this:
There are the caveats that come with this, of course. We should compare our results with pre-covid data (2019) and there will be a disproportionate impact of the pandemic depending on the geographical location of your school. There will be more ‘big swings’ this year and we are all adjusting to the return of 2019 equivalent grade boundaries. However, I wanted to share this new in addition to the sharing of the highest progress scores to add to the celebration of the work we are all doing to improve the educational outcomes and life chances of our pupils. Looking at schools that are making improvements from negative progress to positive, or improving a substantial amount in a year is helpful. We can look to these school to see what they are doing to get better and consider what we can replicate in our own context.