I was recently asked on Twitter whether it was true that all “disapplied” pupils were assigned a progress score of -25 at key stage 2. The teacher asking had been told that this was the case and was now worried that this could wipe out the progress of all other pupils.

Thankfully, this is not true. No group of pupils is assigned a fixed progress score. Progress is dependent on pupils having a valid baseline and end-of-KS result. The progress score comes from comparing their end-of-KS score against the national average score for pupils with the same start point. No valid start or end point; no progress score. Simple.

But the question got me thinking about the term disapplied and what it means - or rather, what people think it means - and it turns out I’ve been using it incorrectly. I went back to the source of the tweet and asked the person to clarify.

In this case, disapplied was being used to refer to pupils recently arrived from overseas (in the last two years). These pupils should really be referred to as “discounted”, not disapplied; RAISE guidance makes this distinction. Discounted pupils are removed from all measures and cannot count towards progress because they have no baseline. This much I knew.

But many, myself included, use disapplied to refer to pupils that don’t take the test, and this isn’t right either.

I fired up the RAISEonline value-added tool, put in some baseline data and then chose “D” (disapplied) in place of a KS2 result, expecting to be prompted to enter a pre-KS teacher assessment instead (the pre-KS assessments are assigned a nominal score for purposes of progress measures), but it wouldn’t let me. A “D” code automatically excluded the pupil from the progress measure. Switching the “D” to “B” (below standard of test), however, did allow a pre-KS assessment to be inputted. So, what exactly is the difference between disapplied and “below”?

I turned to Twitter, where many people were unsure what disapplied meant, but someone stepped in and clarified. “B” is used for pupils below the level of the test, and those coded as such should have a corresponding pre-KS teacher assessment. Logical. “D”, on the other hand, is reserved for those pupils disapplied from the entire national curriculum and for whom it is not possible to submit an assessment. Such pupils are rare in a mainstream setting.

I’ve recently seen datasets with pupils incorrectly coded as disapplied, who consequently have no valid teacher assessment. This is a problem for current and future measures, and possibly for the pupils themselves. The schools concerned did not do this deliberately; it results from a common misconception that clearly needs to be addressed.

Many thanks to @hertsassessment for help with this column.

James Pembroke founded Sig+, an independent school data consultancy, after 10 years working with the Learning and Skills Council and local authorities www.sigplus.co.uk.