Assessment results
Inspection reports, from both Ofsted and SIAMS, will help you form a judgement about how well we perform as a school, but they can never give a complete picture, and they can be several years behind the developing story of a school community.
Another important piece of the picture comes from a school’s assessment results. Usually these results are more up to date than the inspection reports, but due to the Covid pandemic the most recent assessment results available from all English schools are from the 2018-2019 academic year. These results will be updated once new performance measures are published by the Secretary of State.
Usually the latest assessment results are published in December each year: the results for each individual school are published, and to help put those results in context, there are also national results and results for each local authority. So you can compare our performance with the county and national averages.
Click on each school to access the latest published assessment results.
Long Preston Giggleswick Hellifield
Understanding the data
The results published for primary schools are taken from the assessments (SATs) made at the end of Key Stage 2, when pupils are in their final year in primary school, year 6. The data which are published are:
- progress scores in reading, writing and maths
- percentage of pupils who achieved at least the expected standard in reading, writing and maths
- percentage of pupils who achieved at a higher standard in reading, writing and maths
- average ‘scaled scores’ in reading and maths
Results for any individual school will often vary a lot from year to year, which does not always link to the standard of teaching and learning. Results are published as percentages and in small schools like ours, with up to 10 children at most in the assessment group, each child counts as almost 10% or more! This has quite an impact on data. Results are not published for year groups with fewer than 10 children.
Year groups naturally vary in ability, sometimes quite a bit, so one or two children reaching, or not reaching, a particular standard compared with the previous year, can look misleadingly like a dramatic change in the school’s performance. A broader view across several years, and a comparison with other schools across the same timeframe, can give a more balanced view of how we’re doing and how we’re developing.
Download the Department for Education’s leaflet for parents for more information on how the assessment process works at the end of Key Stage 2.