Lperformance metrics

League Table

A ranked listing of schools by performance measures such as Progress 8 or Attainment 8.

A league table is a ranked listing of schools by performance. The DfE publishes official tables based on Progress 8, Attainment 8, EBacc, and other measures each year. Newspapers and websites build their own variants on top.

How to read a league table sceptically:

Sample size matters. A school with 30 pupils in the cohort can swing 5 - 10 places year to year purely on chance.
Selective intakes inflate Attainment 8. Look at Progress 8 if you want to compare schools that admit different intakes.
Single year of data is noisy. A 3-year trend is far more informative than a single year.
Independents using IGCSE are absent. They typically don’t appear in the DfE table at all.

On FavSchools we publish 5 - 8 years of historical data per school exactly so league-table snapshots can be checked against the trend.