School performance measures do not perform: examining the meaning of school performance

Secondary school performance measures (SPMs) were introduced in England in 1992 and have become fundamental metrics affecting schools’ policy, funding and choice. SPMs are at the heart of the school accountability system and are described by the UK government’s Department for Education (2024a) as serving three main purposes: (i) identifying school underperformance and shaping subsequent interventions, (ii) contributing to the school inspection system and (iii) informing parental choice. SPMs have been subject to extensive critique, including for their statistical validity and their wider effects, but these criticisms have had little effect on the policy of performance measurement. In this study, we leverage national schools data to conduct the first systematic empirical analysis of the construct of ‘performance’ across the headline SPMs, how this is operationalised in SPMs and what factors contribute to performance measurement. We demonstrate that three of the current six SPMs are effectively redundant, and that performance measurement relies heavily on factors related to school intake rather than effectiveness. This study illustrates the inadequacy of current headline SPMs and identifies key directions for change to reach more accurate and equitable measures of performance, including reducing unnecessary redundancy in SPMs and disentangling school character and context from performance. Our work makes a timely contribution to current academic and policy discussions around the design and operationalisation of SPMs, and demonstrates the potential of data-driven analysis to better understand the complex interactions of a range of factors which underpin SPMs and to inform more responsive policy.