Report
How much of a league table is just intake
Raw results track how advantaged a school's pupils are more closely than they track anything the school does. Here is the size of that effect, measured across every state school in England.
- Correlation, disadvantage against Attainment 8
- -0.56
- Correlation, disadvantage against Progress 8
- -0.41
3,215 secondary schools. Strongly negative: the more disadvantaged the intake, the lower the raw score.
3,141 schools. Much weaker — which is the point. Progress 8 was designed to strip intake out, and largely does.
The two correlations are the whole argument. Attainment 8 moves strongly with disadvantage; Progress 8, which measures how far pupils travelled rather than where they arrived, moves far less. A table sorted on attainment is close to a table sorted on affluence.
This is a correlation across schools, not a causal model. It does not say that disadvantaged pupils cannot achieve highly, and the outperformers report shows plenty that do. It says that judging a school by its raw results mostly tells you who its pupils are.
Computed from the same data the rest of this site serves — the DfE performance tables, the school census, Ofsted inspection outcomes, the Indices of Deprivation 2019, HM Land Registry price paid data and Census 2021. How each figure is calculated.