Pupils make more progress in maths than English during Year 7, according to new research.

The study found that while on average pupils made absolute progress in both subjects, 42 per cent of students in English and 37 per cent in maths “stood still or regressed”.

Researchers from the assessment software company No More Marking set out to examine whether pupils made “absolute progress” in Year 7.

The key accountability measure currently used in secondary schools, Progress 8, is a relative measure of progress. It looks at how pupils perform relative to their cohort on a baseline test, and then compares this to how they did relative to their cohort on a second test.

However, this means it cannot be used to tell whether the whole system is improving or not. It is also not a direct measure of how much pupils have learnt, meaning a pupil can learn a lot but still be given a negative progress measure if they have not learned as much as pupils who started at the same point as them.

Absolute progress

No More Marking used its “comparative judgement” assessment technique to examine absolute progress. Pupils at a nationally representative set of schools were assessed in September and June of Year 7, with 28,582 students assessed in English and 28,443 in maths.

The researchers found that, overall, pupils made absolute progress in both subjects between the two dates. However, the level of progress varied between the subjects, with pupils improving on average by about two-thirds of a GCSE grade in maths, but only one-third of a grade in English.

The researchers said the average was also “distributed unevenly”, with some pupils making “very significant progress, while others go backwards”.

In English 42 per cent of pupils “either stood still or regressed”, and in maths it was 37 per cent.

In both subjects, 10 per cent of pupils saw their score fall by the equivalent of two GCSE grades. However, in English, 18 per cent saw their score improve by the same amount, while 25 per cent did so in maths.

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