MORE than one in eight secondary schools in England is below the new tougher floor standard deemed acceptable by ministers, according to the latest league table data.

The tables for secondary school tables were published last week, featuring the results of the first pupils to sit new, tougher GCSEs in English and maths.

Around 12% of schools, 365 in total, were below the new tougher standard. In 2016 it was 282, 9.3%.

Schools are judged by two new measures, Progress 8 and Attainment 8. Progress 8 was introduced in 2016. It aims to capture the progress a pupil makes from the end of primary school to the end of secondary school. It is a type of value added measure, which means that pupils’ results are compared to the actual achievements of other pupils with similar prior attainment.

Attainment 8 measures the achieve-ment of a pupil across eight qualifications including mathematics (double weighted) and English (double weighted), 3 further qualifications that count in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) measure and 3 further qualifications that can be GCSE qualifications (including EBacc subjects) or any other non-GCSE qualif-ications on the DfE approved list. Each individual grade a pupil achieves is assigned a point score, which is then used to calculate a pupil’s Attainment 8 score.

The Progress 8 floor standard is -0.5. Okehampton College achieved above average with 0.26, along with 12% of other schools in England, Callington College achieved an average score of -0.05 (matching around 40% of schools) while Tavistock College scored below average with -0.21 — matching around 18% of schools.

There are significant regional variations, with London having the lowest proportion of underperforming schools, with the north east having the highest. The tables use raw GCSE results from last year along with a raft of data from the Department for Education.

In schools where pupils failed to progress to the expected level (-0.5 or below in Progress 8), they were getting around half a GCSE grade worse than they could have done, based on end of primary school results.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: ‘Today’s secondary school performance tables cannot be compared with previous years because the government has once again moved the goalposts.

‘The new 9-1 grading system for GCSE English and maths has complicated the way in which the headline measures of school performance are calculated, with Attainment 8 and Progress 8 having to be worked out using a combination of 9-1 grades and the old A*-G grades.

‘It is particularly frustrating that the bar for achievement in English and maths has been raised arbitrarily to a grade 5 under the new system, which is higher than the old standard of grade C.

‘And it is potentially baffling for parents and employers that schools are now judged on grade 5 – described as a ‘strong pass’ – while grade 4 is good enough to be deemed a ‘standard pass’.

‘Our message to the DfE, trust boards, governors and inspectors is to avoid leaping to judgement on the basis of these performance tables. They only tell us a limited amount about the true quality of a school. It is a system which is undergoing significant change and which will continue to be turbulent in summer 2018 with the next phase of new-style GCSEs.’