INTRODUCTION

The Secretary of State is committed to the publication in performance tables of measures of value added by schools and colleges, based on the progress made by individual students from one stage of their education to another. This site contains the results of a pilot study designed to look at how value added might be measured and presented post-16 in the performance tables. We are very grateful to those schools and colleges who volunteered to participate in the pilot and willingly checked additional data so that these results could be presented alongside the information already available in the performance tables.

The Department, academic and educational bodies, schools, colleges and others have already done a lot of work on value added. There are different ways of measuring value added. The Department shortly intends to consult widely on a range of options for the introduction of value added measures, both for compulsory school age pupils and post-16, before introducing them nationally in performance tables. We would very much like to hear your views as work to develop value added measures for performance tables progresses.

We have published two sets of results; each measures value added using a different starting point. The following pages describe the background to the pilot study. This is followed by the pilot results. Technical annexes explain the value added calculations in more detail. A full evaluation report will be published in time.