Reading last year’s national examinations without flattening the story
Unified National Examination outcomes for a leaving cohort are a real picture. They are not a verdict on every class still sitting in year 9.
The Unified National Examinations are public, high-stakes, and easy to treat as the school’s annual score. Directors know they are not that. Governors, arriving once a term, sometimes treat them as if they were.
A useful facing-page spread shows the leaving cohort this year and last year, with the number of candidates printed in the same type size as the average. When the cohort shrinks, an average can jump without anyone teaching differently. When it grows, a dip can look like a crisis that belongs to a staffing decision already taken two years earlier.
We also ask whether the internal marks for years 10 and 11 are being used to “explain” the examination page. They can sit nearby. They should not be averaged into the same number. Different tests, different pupils, different days in June.
If a subject had fewer than fifteen candidates, we prefer a sentence to a bar. The sentence can still be honest: this was a small group; here is how they sat; here is what we will not claim.