Progress 8 (explained in 3 minutes)

Progress 8 is the government's new way of measuring how well pupils make progress at secondary school. In the past, the main measure of school performance has been the percentage of pupils who got five or more A star to C grades in their GCSEs, including maths and English. Progress 8 is a better measure because it includes how well pupils of all abilities have done. The Progress 8 score tells you how well pupils in a school do, whether they get better or worse grades compared to pupils in other schools. Results in up to eight qualifications are counted in a school's Progress 8 score, and these are split into four categories, known as buckets. The first bucket is for English. The second is for maths. These grades achieved in English and maths are double-weighted to reflect the importance of these subjects. The third bucket includes three qualifications in science, computer science, history, geography, and languages, in any combination. The fourth bucket is for any other three qualifications. The results are compared to the national average of pupils with similar academic starting positions. The academic starting point is based on pupils' results in English and maths assessments, often known as SATs. A school's Progress 8 score is usually between minus one and plus one. Plus one means that pupils in that school are achieving, on average, one grade more in each qualification than similar pupils across the country. Minus one means that pupils are achieving one grade less. Schools with a Progress 8 score of below minus 0.5 are not achieving the minimum standard expected by the government. These schools may come under increased scrutiny by Ofsted. A school with plus 0.5 or greater is making well above average progress with its pupils. The average Progress 8 score of all secondary school pupils nationally is zero. It's a relative measure that shows if a school's pupils are achieving above or below the national average. It means that half of our secondary schools have positive scores and the other half have negative. The qualifications that your children achieve will continue to be what is considered by employers and by schools and colleges for post-16 places. You'll be able to see every secondary school's provisional 2016 Progress 8 score on the Department of Education's performance tables website from October. Revised data is then published in January. Some schools chose to opt into the new measure a year early and for those schools you can view their 2015 Progress 8 score.