What Progress 8 actually measures

Progress 8 is the measure most worth understanding and the one most often misread. It is not a measure of how good a school’s results are. It is a measure of how much better or worse they are than expected, given the pupils the school started with, which is a different question and usually a more useful one.

Attainment 8 first

Progress 8 is built on Attainment 8, so start there. Attainment 8 scores each pupil across eight GCSE-level qualifications, arranged in three groups:

• English and maths, each counting double. English only double-counts if the pupil sat both language and literature, in which case the higher grade is used.
• Three English Baccalaureate subjects: sciences, computer science, history, geography or a language.
• Three open slots, filled by any remaining approved qualification, academic or vocational.

Empty slots score zero. A pupil who sits five GCSEs and nothing else carries three zeros into the average, which is why Attainment 8 punishes a narrow curriculum as well as poor grades. The school’s Attainment 8 is simply the mean across its pupils.

Then the comparison

Every pupil is placed in a prior attainment group based on their Key Stage 2 results at age 11. Nationally, each group has an average Attainment 8 score: this is what pupils who started where yours started actually went on to achieve.

A pupil’s Progress 8 is the gap between their own Attainment 8 and that national average for their group, divided by ten. The school’s Progress 8 is the mean of its pupils’ scores.

So zero is not a bad score. Zero means the school’s pupils did exactly as well as similar pupils nationally did. Because the gap is divided by ten and Attainment 8 has ten weighted slots, a score of +0.5 works out at roughly half a grade better per slot, which across a whole cohort is a substantial difference rather than a rounding error.

The Department for Education publishes confidence intervals alongside the score, and they matter: a small cohort produces a wide interval, and a score whose interval crosses zero is not distinguishable from average however far from zero it looks.

Why this matters more than raw results

A school in a wealthy area with a highly-attaining intake will post strong Attainment 8 almost regardless of how well it teaches. A school serving a poorer catchment can teach superbly and still post ordinary raw results, because its pupils started further back.

Progress 8 is the attempt to separate those two things. It is the reason a school with unremarkable GCSE results can have excellent Progress 8, and why that combination is usually more encouraging than the reverse. A school with high attainment and negative progress is one where able pupils are doing less well than they should, a fact the headline results actively conceal.

This is also why the score on this site weights progress separately from attainment rather than folding them together.

What it still does not tell you

Progress 8 is an average, and averages hide distribution. A school can reach the same score by lifting everyone slightly or by pushing a few pupils a long way while others drift.

It is also sensitive to small cohorts. In a year group of 60, a handful of pupils having a bad summer moves the score visibly. Treat a single year as a cohort rather than a trend, which is why school pages here chart several years where the data exists.

And it can be gamed at the edges, by entering pupils for qualifications that fill slots cheaply. That is much harder than it was, but the measure has never been entirely immune to being taught to.

There is no Progress 8 for 2025 or 2026

This surprises people, and it is worth knowing before you go looking.

Progress 8 needs a Key Stage 2 baseline from when the cohort was eleven. The pupils who sat GCSEs in 2025 and 2026 would have taken those SATs in 2020 and 2021, when primary tests were cancelled. There is no baseline, so the measure cannot be calculated. In April 2024 the government confirmed there would be no replacement or proxy measure for those two years.

The Department for Education continues to publish attainment measures (Attainment 8, grade 5+ in English and maths) and to show the most recent Progress 8 scores that do exist, from 2022/23 and 2023/24. Progress 8 returns for the 2026/27 cohort, who sat their KS2 tests normally.

So a Progress 8 figure you see for a school today describes its 2024 leavers at the most recent. That does not make it useless: teaching quality does not turn over in a year. But it is older than the attainment figures beside it, and two years of attainment-only data is exactly the period when reading raw results as though they were progress is most misleading.

Changes coming

The English Baccalaureate is being wound down, and the Attainment 8 groups are being reconstituted around that change: broadly, a science group and a wider group of approved subjects replacing the current EBacc and open slots. Progress 8 will continue to be built on whatever Attainment 8 becomes, so the principle survives even as the ingredients change. Check the DfE guidance below for the current position before relying on the detail.

Where to look next

• Data sources and limits: which release each measure here comes from and how current it is.
• How the score works: why progress is weighted separately from attainment rather than folded together.
• How to read the new Ofsted report cards: the other headline judgement on a secondary school’s page.
• Compare schools side by side: the same measures across up to four schools at once.