If you took the 100 mainstream schools with the highest proportion of disadvantaged students and the lowest proportion of students with English as an additional language (EAL), how many do you think would have a positive Progress 8 (P8) score?

The answer is just seven.

These 100 schools serve predominantly white, working-class communities where disadvantage stands at 41.1 per cent or above (the national average is 25.7) and EAL is at 9.2 per cent or below (the average is 21.4).

When we extend the data to include 150 schools - this time with disadvantage at 39 per cent or above, and EAL at 10.8 per cent or below - a similar picture emerges. Of these 150 settings, just 11 have a positive P8.

Why is it that so few schools with these demographics can obtain a positive P8? And what does this tell us about P8 as a measure of school quality? Is it a sign that the system is inherently unfair, or proof that P8 shines a useful spotlight on issues to guide future policymaking?

While questions about the value of P8 have been asked before, the fact that 2025 marks the first of two years for which P8 won’t be published (because no Sats took place in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic) makes now an apt time for a closer look.

Time for a P8 rethink

First, some context: P8 is a performance indicator used to measure the academic progress students make at secondary school, calculated by comparing a child’s performance in key stage 2 Sats with their performance in eight GCSE subjects, then comparing this progress to that of others nationwide. These scores are averaged to find a number for the whole school.

A positive P8 means a school’s students have made more progress than others with similar prior attainment, while a negative P8 means they have made less. 

The measure was introduced under the Conservative government in 2016, when Nick Gibb was schools minister. When Tes asked him about the data above, he suggested this was not a weakness with the metric, but a strength.

“[The data] is revealing a very real issue. We need to know that the schools in your sample are struggling,” he says. “It’s an indication that we need to improve the teaching in those schools.”

It was for this sort of insight that the former Conservative government did away with the old model where schools were judged according to the proportion of their students who received five or more GCSE grades at A*-C including English and maths, known as 5AC.

With that, “we were able to identify schools that were good, but […] it didn’t take into account the context of the children and their starting points,” Gibb explains. Comparatively, “Progress 8 is a contextualising mechanism”.

An imperfect measure

Jon Andrews, head of analysis and director for school system and performance at the Education Policy Institute, agrees that while P8 is “not a perfect measure, it’s better than some of the others used” - such as 5AC, or Attainment 8, a pure attainment metric.

At the time of its introduction, P8 “was a big step forward because it took account of pupils’ prior attainment”, Andrews adds.

However, he acknowledges that P8 “doesn’t recognise that pupils from different backgrounds make different rates of progress”. 

As such, he says, the results of Tes’s analysis is “not surprising, because when you look at the national data by pupil characteristics, there is a wide gap between pupils from low-income backgrounds and everyone else”.

He adds: “If you’ve got lots of pupils who are eligible for free school meals [FSM], you’re going to have a much lower Progress 8 score”.

The impact of EAL

Meanwhile, if you have a low EAL figure, you’re also more likely to end up with a low P8.

“Pupils with EAL typically make more progress than other pupils. That’s partly because their prior attainments are often not a true reflection of their actual attainment, and they catch up and progress faster during key stage 3 and key stage 4,” Andrews says.

Carl Cullinane, director of research and policy at The Sutton Trust, adds that another reason for this is the comparative aspiration of EAL students, many of whom come from migrant families. 

“Across a lot of countries, immigrants tend to have high levels of aspiration, and pass that on to their kids. Even though they [might be] low earners in this country, that doesn’t mean they were low earners in the country they’ve come from. It may not reflect their educational background,” he explains.

By contrast, Cullinane adds, “poverty among white British groups can be endemic [where families have lived] in extremely poor areas generation after generation”. 

But P8 is not a sophisticated enough measure to capture this, Cullinane adds.

“If the aim of P8 is to measure how well a school is contributing to the learning of their pupils, it’s very limited, because the characteristics of pupils that impact their learning go way beyond the prior attainment,” he says.

“All the data backs this up,” he continues, adding that a variety of characteristics - not just disadvantage and EAL - affect a child’s rate of progress. 

“It’s unfair on a significant group of schools that may be performing very well given the intake of pupils they have, and that is not being recognised in the Progress 8 measure.”

‘An impossible situation’ for schools

School leaders share these concerns. Robert Coles, deputy CEO of Education South West, a Devon-based MAT with 14 schools, tells Tes that P8 presents “an impossible situation” for schools.

He refers to research that shows that disadvantaged students are on average 19.3 months behind their peers by the time they take their GCSEs, “which means that effectively they are finishing Year 11 at the same kind of development point that a Year 9 is at”. 

As such, “it is no surprise at all that schools with a large proportion of pupils below the development age of more advanced peers are going to score much lower”.

Coles adds that a further challenge is that although P8 measures progress, and should in theory account for children who start at different levels, “the gap [for disadvantaged students] widens during their secondary education” - posing another flaw in the metric. 

There are multiple factors contributing to disadvantage, many of which schools may not be able to influence. As some of those factors only really start to bite at secondary school, it’s not uncommon for a school to be doing everything it can, only to still see little progress - a reality that P8 fails to acknowledge.

Meanwhile, Luke Sparkes, CEO of Dixons Academies Trust, which runs 17 academies in the North West, says the simplicity of P8 as a measure means it “doesn’t reflect the reality for the most complex schools, especially in the North”. For example, P8 “results can be skewed by persistent non-attendance despite intensive intervention”.

A negative P8 can have far-reaching consequences

This is a particular challenge in working-class communities, adds Coles, pointing out that “schools with higher percentages of disadvantage are more likely to have higher attendance challenges. A Progress 8 score is massively skewed when children don’t attend well and don’t complete examinations”.

Andrews adds that a negative P8 can have far-reaching consequences for a school. 

“When we label schools as underperforming, we make it harder for them. It’s harder to recruit teachers and it’s harder to attract pupils,” he says.

Keziah Featherstone, executive headteacher at the West Midlands-based Mercian Trust, says she has seen this in action. “I’ve heard comments from parents [who say] they don’t want their children to mix with ‘those sorts’ of children because of the background they have. They see certain schools as being undesirable.” 

This means disadvantaged children can be concentrated in certain schools within a local area, in turn meaning these schools find achieving a positive P8 more difficult - and so the cycle repeats.

“The Progress 8 measure has done nothing to support some of our most vulnerable young people, or the schools that serve them,” Featherstone concludes.

Calls for a more contextual measure

So, should P8 be reconsidered to include contextual detail?

Cullinane thinks so. “I think there’s a real need to move towards a more contextual measure of school performance,” he says.

Andrews adds that “there are ways we could do it better, and the Department [for Education] could be thinking about that over the next couple of years when we don’t have Progress 8”.

However, Gibb argues that by including more context, “you’re expecting less of those children”, adding that it would lead, as he has been much quoted as saying, to “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

Instead, he says the data should be used to get schools to recognise the challenges they face and work to overcome them: “I don’t want to hear any excuses for not getting the same results in your school as they’re getting in this other school five miles away,” he argues.

“They’re not getting all the extra cash you are, and I expect you to spend that cash helping those children overcome their disadvantages.”

Tim Leunig, the economist who came up with P8 for the DfE almost a decade ago, agrees with Gibb that Tes’s analysis is not an indication that P8 should change, but a warning about the issue of children from white, working-class backgrounds not progressing as well as their peers. 

“What I think would be less good is to change P8 to sweep those consequences under the carpet. I think that risks us thinking that everything is OK, which is definitely not the case,” he tells Tes. 

He does acknowledge it would be “possible to build a contextualised value-added [CVA] model”, which could include characteristics such as ethnicity, deprivation, special educational needs and disabilities, looked-after children and month of birth. 

But, he adds, this wouldn’t be a foolproof system because it would come with its own statistical dilemmas.

“We could include FSM or PP, but not all FSM and PP are the same. A kid whose parents have been out of work for many years does typically have a different home environment to someone whose parent lost their job briefly, but whose parents’ education, housing etc are very different,” he says.

An alternative progress measure

Despite these complexities, some are trying to show what a different approach could look like. 

For example, the Northern Powerhouse Partnership has published three editions of the Fairer Schools Index, which it describes as its own “contextually adjusted alternative to the government’s Progress 8 measure” due to the way P8 “unfairly disadvantages schools with high proportions of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

In its latest edition, based on 2023 data, after adjusting schools’ P8 scores for context including disadvantage, EAL and ethnicity, 233 schools in the north of England received upgraded categories, including 109 that moved from below average to average.

George Leckie, professor of social statistics at the University of Bristol, who works on the Fairer Schools Index, says the model “strips out the national trends and, we would argue, leaves a fairer comparison across schools”.

Might this be a model for a new government progress measure? 

Leckie says the time is certainly right, as the current pause in the publication of P8 provides “a natural opportunity to revisit and revise how these accountability measures are done”.

It would seem to make sense politically, too. “With the government going from Conservative to Labour, one might imagine they would be more sympathetic to this argument,” he says, confirming that the Fairer Schools Index group has “certainly had meetings” with government.

A focus on white, working-class students

What’s more, the government has launched an inquiry into the educational outcomes of white, working-class young people, chaired by Estelle Morris and Hamid Patel and featuring both former and current education figures, including Sir Kevan Collins and Baroness Nicky Morgan.

Given that inequality is clearly a wider concern for government, will this include using the two-year hiatus on P8 scores to create a new metric?

Perhaps not, as P8 seems to have broad support from co-chair Patel, who is CEO of Star Academies. He tells Tes that he thinks “Progress 8 does accurately highlight underachievement in white working-class communities, which makes it a useful metric for tracking the impact of schools’ efforts.

“Over time, I would hope we will see schools with high proportions of disadvantaged pupils and low EAL improve their Progress 8 scores - indicating they’re improving faster than others,” he adds. “In that way, Progress 8 is an effective tool for evaluating progress.”

However, Patel doesn’t rule out the idea it could be changed, especially if the government sets out a clear desire for a new way to consider school outcomes.

“[P8] reflects the priorities a government has chosen, emphasising progress across eight high-quality qualifications, with double weighting on English and maths and a strong emphasis on the EBacc [English Baccalaureate]. If those priorities change, Progress 8 will report a little differently, and there may well be a case for reviewing them.”

Tes also contacted the DfE to ask whether it has plans to rethink P8 but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Clearly, though, many hope Labour will seize this opportunity for change - not least those schools that currently face a tall order achieving a positive score in a metric many believe has run its course.

You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android