The publication of key stage four performance tables and statistics will be delayed by two weeks after a “significant number” of “key” re-mark results were omitted from the data.
Neil McIvor, the Department for Education’s chief statistician, announced on the DfE website that that the figures, which were due to be published next Thursday, will be delayed by a fortnight.
This includes the revised 2019 school performance tables data for key stage four and the associated national statistics and multi-academy trust statistics.
McIvor said the DfE had identified a “processing issue” which has led to a “significant number of late results being omitted” from the data which is used to produce the revise key stage four outputs.
“The missing results relate to re-marks in key GCSEs such as English and maths, so would have a material impact on some reported school data if omitted.”
He added that to “preserve the quality of our national statistics”, and prevent schools being “disadvantaged” by incorrect data being made public, the DfE had decided to delay all the data by two weeks in order to resolve the issue.
The provisional 2019 statistics published in October are still available, and McIvor said data provided to schools via the checking exercise website is correct. The complete data will be published on Thursday, February 6.
The DfE has faced multiple issues with its GCSE data this year. In October, Schools Week reported errors in the progress 8 scores provided to schools by government due to a problem with GCSE statistics.
Some pupils had their GCSE statistics results double-weighted in their progress 8 score instead of maths, while in other cases statistics results were not counted in the “open” buckets for progress 8, leading to incorrect overall scores for schools.
In September it emerged that some schools’ progress 8 scores were as much as 0.2 points lower than expected because Pearson sent incomplete BTEC results to the government.
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