How the Completion and Attainment measure is used to determine the ‘progress’ of students on Tech Levels and Tech Certificates.
Following a break-out session we were pleased to run at the AoC Data, Performance and Accountability Conference in October, we’ve been following up with a short series of articles about the Level 3 Value Added measure. Our first article looked at what it is (and why it’s so important) and then, in our second article, we looked at how to calculate it.
Now we’re going to turn to the Completion and Attainment measure – which qualifications does it apply to and is it any different to the Value-Added measure?
The Completion and Attainment measure is used to evaluate the progress of students who are studying qualifications within the Tech Level (level 3) and Tech Cert (level 2) categories. This measure is different to the Value-Added measure as, for these qualifications, there are only fairly weak statistical relationships between the results gained by a student at Key Stage 4 (KS4) and those gained at Key Stage 5 (KS5). In other words, it is not possible to predict reliably the grade that students will achieve in a Tech Level qualification (KS5) from the grades that they achieved at KS4.
As the name implies, the Completion and Attainment measure calculates the average grade of those students who attain the qualification and compares this to the average for the national cohort for the same qualification.
For the Completion and Attainment measure, any student who does not complete or who fails is allocated zero points and these results are included in the overall calculation. So, the greater the number of non-completers or failures, the lower the average attainment.
The Completion and Attainment results for each school and college are shown in the following format – see the Government Website – Search for Schools and Colleges: https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/find-a-school-in-england
The average points for each college are converted to a ‘fine’ grade and compared to the results for the local authority and the results for the whole of England.
Our next article, and the final one in this series, will do a little crystal-ball gazing: can we expect any changes to the Value-Added method in the future?