The delayed Primary Accountability Technical Guidance has now been published, which has enabled me to update the VA calculator tool with the new prior attainment groups and associated benchmark estimates. As discussed in last week’s post, there are issues with the guidance – the annexes, which contain many important aspects of the methodology – still point to 2023. For example, the standard deviations used to calculate the confidence intervals have not been updated. And the extreme outlier lookup table, which limits the impact of very low pupil progress scores is also unchanged. This means that the VA calculator will need a further update when amended guidance is released.
See below for link to download.
The tool works in the usual way: enter the KS1 prior attainment and the KS2 results in the columns provided, and the spreadsheet will do the following:
- place pupils into low/middle/high prior attainment bands (unlike the checking data these should be correct)
- Sift pupils into one of 20 prior attainment groups (PAGs)
- Calculate the KS2 benchmarks for each pupil for each subject
- Compare the actual to the benchmark to calculate the individual progress scores
- Aggregate the pupil progress to generate the school progress scores on the school VA tab
- Apply the confidence interval to establish whether the result is significantly above or below average (note: as explained above, this currently uses the 2023 standard deviation so treat with caution)
You can then use the tool to explore the impact of individual pupils on overall progress scores, and remove pupils to get a recalculated figure. To remove a pupil, simply delete their KS1 results. You don’t need to delete the entire row.
Please read the notes tab for further instructions. If you need to unlock the spreadsheet for any reason, the password is primary.
Insight users
If your school uses Insight, you can populate this tool by exporting a table of your 2025/26 year 6’s KS1 and KS2 results, which you can then paste into the spreadsheet. Go to Reports > Tables, select the relevant year 6 in the year filter at the top of the screen, and add assessments columns with selections shown in screenshot below. Repeat for reading, writing and maths. Click download, export to excel and copy and paste the data into the columns provided for pupil names, KS1 and KS2 results. Note: use Paste Special > Values (Ctrl + Alt + V) rather than standard paste to preserve formatting. Also, beware hidden columns – pasting into these will overwrite the formulae.
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