Article 4: Value-Added: what further changes are on the horizon?

To round up our series of articles on the Level 3 Value-Added (L3VA) Measure ( see: https://vlesupport.co.uk/news/ ), we are going to look at what updates we can expect in future, and how the Headline Measures might relate to T Levels.

On 2nd July, DfE published the 2019 Statement of Intent which sets out the information that will be published in the 2019 school and college performance tables and beyond.  As you will see from the table below, there are plans to bring more existing qualifications into the scope of the Value-Added methodology.

Whether or not a qualification can be evaluated using the Value-Added method depends on whether there is a robust statistical relationship between the performance of students at Key Stage 4 against their performance at Key Stage 5.  So far, only qualifications in the categories of ‘Academic’ (including A levels) and ‘Applied General’ are subject to the L3VA methodology.

The Department has published new results which show the performance of the Headline Measures for all those students who are deemed to be ‘disadvantaged’.  From January 2020, all the published Headline Measures include a parallel set of data which, for each school and college, shows how disadvantaged students perform against those non-disadvantaged students in the local authority area and in the whole of England.  Disadvantaged students are identified by whether their school received additional funding for them under the Pupil Premium scheme when they were in their last year of Key Stage 4.

The Department will publish ‘shadow’ L3VA for Tech Level qualifications in March 2020, which may also include value added data for Technical Certificates (level 2) qualifications.  Previously, ‘progress’ for these students has been evaluated using the ‘completion and attainment methodology’. The shadow data will enable schools and colleges to check their data and review the implications of their performance, but the shadow data will not be used in the Schools and Colleges Headline performance data.  It is planned that final value-added data will be published for these Tech Level qualifications in January 2021.

For the English and maths progress scores, a new system of point scores will be introduced next January but the methodology will remain largely same.

The Department is clearly giving a lot of consideration to how the performance of the new T Levels will be evaluated and have announced that they will use the following 5 measures:

• Attainment
• Completion
• English and maths
• Progress
• Destinations

However, the Department is not yet able to say whether the new T Levels will be subject to a value-added methodology or a completion and attainment methodology (see the last article for more details on this).  However, they hope to be able release ‘shadow’ L3VA data for T Levels in March 2024 (after the completion of the first cohort of T Level students).

The Department is also introducing Headline Measures for multi-site colleges to be able to demonstrate the performance of their constituent colleges or sites individually if they wish.

Clearly, the Department seems keen to expand the scope and usage of the value-added methodology.  If they are successful, then many schools and colleges, which currently have very few students studying qualifications that fall under the L3VA methodology, will need to take the value-added methodology much more seriously!  We are looking forward to incorporating these changes within eTrackr^ILP and in our newly emerging product called ePerform.

If you missed our earlier articles on this topic, you can find them here:

• Measuring Progress using Level 3 Value-Added – what is it and why does it matter?
• How do you calculate your Value-Added score?
• What is the Completion & Attainment Measure?