Assessment results
Inspection reports, from both Ofsted and SIAMS, will help you form a judgement about how well we perform as a school, but they can never give a complete picture, and they can be several years behind the developing story of a school community.
Another important piece of the picture comes from a school’s assessment results. Usually these results are more up to date than the inspection reports, but due to the Covid pandemic the most recent assessment results available from all English schools are from the 2018-2019 academic year. These results will be updated once new performance measures are published by the Secretary of State. The government will not publish KS2 (Key Stage 2, end of primary school) school level data for the 2021 to 2022 academic year. They have archived data from the 2018 to 2019 academic year because they recognise that the data from that year may no longer reflect current performance.
Usually the latest assessment results are published in December each year: the results for each individual school are published, and to help put those results in context, there are also national results and results for each local authority. So you can compare our performance with the county and national averages.
Understanding the data
The results published for primary schools are taken from the assessments (SATs) made at the end of Key Stage 2, when pupils are in their final year in primary school, year 6. The data which are published are:
- progress scores in reading, writing and maths
- percentage of pupils who achieved at least the expected standard in reading, writing and maths
- percentage of pupils who achieved at a higher standard in reading, writing and maths
- average ‘scaled scores’ in reading and maths
It isn’t always easy for a non-specialist to understand the data, but here are a few key points to help, and we are always happy to answer questions, so do get in touch!
Results for any individual school will often vary a lot from year to year, but that doesn’t mean the school is suddenly getting better or worse. Results are published as percentages, but in a small school like Bayford, with only 15 children at most in the assessment group, each child counts as almost 7% or more! Year groups naturally vary in ability, sometimes quite a bit, so one or two more children reaching, or not reaching, a particular standard, compared with the previous year, can look misleadingly like a dramatic change in the school’s performance. A broader view across several years, and a comparison with other schools across the same timeframe, can give a more balanced view of how we’re doing and how we’re developing.
There are plenty of sites giving information about how the assessment process works, but the Department for Education is often a good place to start and you can download their leaflet for parents using the button below.
Our results in 2019
There are two ways in which you can look at our most recent assessment data. You can directly download the information from this page, or you can follow the link to the national school and college performance tables, where you can see our assessment results and also access our Ofsted reports and financial information. As noted above, following the pandemic, the government will not publish KS2 school level data for the 2021 to 2022 academic year. They have archived data from the 2018 to 2019 academic year because they recognise that the data from that year may no longer reflect current performance.
This page was last updated on 7th September 2022