Education

Education inequalities (June 08 2011)

One of the ways the government judges the success of secondary schools is to look at pupils’ performance in examinations taken at the end of compulsory education.  The actual performance measure changes from time to time. For a long time, 5 GCSEs at grades A* - C was used, but in 2006 this was modified to include a requirement for Mathematics and English to be in the 5. The government has signaled an intention to change the measure again, and in 2010 published statistics of performance in the ‘English Baccalaureate’ – see http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/qualifications/englishbac/a0075987/faqebacperformancetables/ (as at June 6th 2011) for details of its development.

The data in this visualisation are the 2009 GCSE results for England, published by the DCSF in December 2009. The current measure (5 GCSEs at grades A* - C including English and Maths) is the basis for most of the displays, though there is also an opportunity is provided to to explore pupil performance using the earlier method (5 GCSEs at grades A*).

Documents:

How to open and use the data interface (08/06/2011)
Commentary on aspects of education data (08/06/2011)
Education teacher notes (08/06/2011)

Software:

Education data visualisation (08/06/2011)