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Guidance

Coronavirus (COVID-19): school and college accountability

Published 8 April 2020

As part of steps taken to fight the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), the government announced that all exams due to take place in schools and colleges in England in summer 2020 are cancelled and that it will not publish any school or college level educational performance data based on tests, assessments or exams for 2020.

This update is to clarify what this means for the way school and college accountability will operate for 2019 to 2020.

Our priority is to work with awarding organisations and Ofqual to ensure that students who were due to take exams in summer 2020 are awarded grades that are as fair as possible so they can move on as planned to the next stage of their lives.

Changes to accountability arrangements

We will not hold schools and colleges to account on the basis of exams and assessment data from summer 2020 and that data will not be used by others, such as Ofsted and local authorities, to hold schools and colleges to account.

School, college or MAT level performance data

We will not be publishing school, college or multi-academy trust (MAT) level performance data based on summer 2020 tests, assessments and exams at any phase.

We will not be publishing, or sharing, school, college or MAT level accountability measures, such as Progress 8 and level 3 value added, using the summer 2020 data.

The performance tables that were due to be released in October and December 2020, and in January and March 2021, will not go ahead.

We will also not publish any institution-level qualification achievement rates in the national achievement rate tables for the 2019 to 2020 academic year.

Primary school assessments

We will not publish any national, regional, local or constituency statistics for any primary school assessments for the 2019 to 2020 academic year.

This includes:

early years foundation stage profile
phonics
key stage 1
multiplication tables check
key stage 2

Exams and assessments

We will not share the educational performance data from 2020 exams and assessments with schools via Analyse School Performance, or through the ASP accredited service.

Schools and colleges will receive details of grades awarded directly from awarding organisations.

We will not run the primary, secondary or 16 to 18 school and college performance data checking exercises and will not return any pupil level or institution level data on the 2020 grades to schools and colleges.

We will not use the 2020 exams data when setting criteria in other areas, such as teaching schools, English and maths hubs and free school applications.

Schools and colleges should not use the 2020 exams data as part of their teacher performance management process.

Organisations that use the data

All those working with schools and colleges, such as Ofsted, Department for Education regional teams and local authorities, should use data from previous years when assessing school and college performance, and not the 2020 data.

This is still available on the performance tables website and Ofsted’s inspection data summary report.

We will say more about accountability arrangements for future years in due course.