In this report on education systems in Repeatedly High Performing Jurisdictions (RHPJs) the authors present data on the assessment approaches used at the end of basic secondary education. These assessments are conducted at around the age of 16, at approximately the stage when students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland take the General…

This report is recently conducted interview research about Key Stage 5 provision among education providers (centres) in England, which complements survey research conducted in the division (Vitello & Williamson, 2017; Williamson & Vitello, 2018a). The aforementioned surveys investigated trends in, and reasoning behind, the provision of AS…

In 2010, the government announced their latest drive to raise the status of vocational qualifications in secondary education. This overhaul was subsequently enacted based on recommendations made by Alison Wolf in her review of vocational education. As a result, the Department for Education (DfE) introduced four new categories of vocational…

This report presents findings from two studies on Advanced Subsidiary (AS) level trends in 2018. The first part of the report describes national trends in AS level entries from analyses of data published by Ofqual. This updates the previous quantitative analysis of AS level trends in 2017 (Vitello & Williamson, 2018). The rest of the report…

This report presents findings from an ongoing research project monitoring the impact of the Advanced Subsidiary (AS) and Advanced (A) level reforms in England that came into effect from September 2015. Three studies were conducted in the spring of 2017, during the second year of teaching of decoupled AS and A levels. The first study analysed…

This report presents research on a cohort of Level 3 Cambridge Technicals students (19095 'unique' students) that were sent to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) to be tracked against the 2017 cycle year for the undergraduate scheme. Information on these students was extracted from Oxford, Cambridge and The Royal Society of…

This report is an updated version of an analysis undertaken last year (Gill, 2017) which looked at the impact of the introduction of new accountability measures (Attainment 8 and Progress 8) on the qualifications and subjects taken by students at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4). It adds in data from the 2016/17 academic year, which was the second…

The recent introduction of new accountability measures in English schools, such as Progress 8, may have had an impact on the qualifications and subjects taken by students and offered by schools in England. The main headline measure by which schools are judged has been changed from the proportion of students achieving 5 or more GCSE grades A* to C…

This report presents a descriptive analysis of uptake and results in the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ), between 2007/08 and 2014/15. The EPQ is a level 3 stand-alone qualification taken by sixth form students. It involves undertaking a substantial project in an area of personal interest, where the outcome can range from writing a…