Understanding school results and league tables
Exam results are the figures parents most want to compare, and also the easiest to misread. These answers explain the main England measures, why a raw score rarely tells the whole story, and why we show results for England alone. For the national picture over time, our data and statistics pages track how the headline measures are moving.
Questions parents ask
- What does Attainment 8 mean?
- Attainment 8 is a score for how a pupil did across eight qualifications at GCSE level, with English and maths counted twice, then averaged across the year group. A school's figure is the mean of its pupils' scores, so it reflects the whole cohort rather than the top or bottom end. It measures the results reached, not the progress made to reach them.
- What is the difference between Attainment 8 and Progress 8?
- Attainment 8 measures how high pupils scored; Progress 8 measures how much they improved from their Key Stage 2 starting point. A school in a demanding area can post a modest Attainment 8 yet a strong Progress 8, which tells you it moved its pupils a long way. The two answer different questions, and a fair view usually needs both.
- What does the Key Stage 2 expected standard mean?
- At the end of primary school in England, pupils sit tests in reading and maths and are assessed by teachers in writing, and the headline figure is the share reaching the expected standard in all three together. It is a threshold rather than an average, so it tells you how many pupils cleared the bar, not how far above or below it the rest sat.
- Should I trust school league tables?
- Read them with care. A single year can swing on a small cohort, the figures say little about a school's intake or the progress it drew out, and a table cannot show what made you consider a school in the first place. Use the numbers to raise questions for a visit rather than to settle the matter, and be wary of comparing schools with very different intakes.
- Why do Welsh and Scottish school pages not show exam results?
- Because Wales and Scotland do not publish school-level attainment under an open licence in a form we can use, so we leave it out rather than invent or estimate it. Welsh and Scottish pages instead lead with the pupil characteristics their governments do publish. We never set one nation's results against another's, because the qualifications and measures are not the same.
- Are independent schools included in the results figures?
- We keep independent schools out of the averages and rankings, because their published Attainment 8 leaves out the international GCSEs many of them enter pupils for, so the figure understates them and is not like for like. Their own pages still show what is published, but they do not distort a town or ranking average built for state schools.