Calculating progress 8 scores

Find out how progress 8 is calculated for maintained schools and academies, including changes for 2021/22. Get to grips with confidence intervals, and see how the calculations differ for pupils with missing or incomplete data.

Last reviewed on 8 November 2022
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School types: All · School phases: Secondary
Ref: 11635
Contents
  1. What is progress 8?
  2. Which qualifications count towards calculating progress 8? 
  3. Understand the changes to KS4 performance measures in 2021/22
  4. Pupils with incomplete or no KS2 results, and those working below the level of the test
  5. Confidence intervals account for ‘natural uncertainty’ of calculations 

This article refers to the DfE guidance on secondary accountability measures.

Qualifications achieved in 2021/22 will be published on school and college performance tables and will also count towards school and college performance measures in future years.

What is progress 8?

Progress 8 is one of the headline performance measures reported for secondary schools. It compares how much progress a pupil makes between the end of primary (Key Stage (KS) 2) and the end of KS4, compared with pupils who started at a similar level at KS2. It tracks this across 8 subjects.

A progress 8 score is the difference between a pupils' actual attainment score across the 8 subjects and the average attainment score of pupils with similar prior attainment.

Each pupil’s average score at KS4 across 8 subjects (their ‘attainment 8’ score) is measured against the national average attainment 8 score for that

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