The Department for Education has just released some provisional data showing that English schoolchildren are making more progress in secondary free schools than any other type of school, save for academy convertors, with whom they share the top spot.
This is according to Progress 8, a relatively new accountability measure which is a little complicated, but worth getting your head around. It measures how much progress a school’s GCSE cohort has made in its best 8 GCSEs relative to the progress made by all English schoolchildren with similar starting points at the age of 11 in their best 8 GCSEs. So if a school gets a Progress 8 score of 1.0 that means the most recent cohort of children who took GCSEs at that school did one whole grade better in each of their best 8 subjects than schoolchildren across the country with similar starting points.
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