Why Your School's Progress 8 Score Has Disappeared — and What to Use Instead

If you're touring secondary schools this autumn and looking up results, you'll notice something odd: no school has a recent Progress 8 score. Not the outstanding one up the road, not the one in special measures. The newest score anywhere is from summer 2024 results. Here's exactly why — and how to compare schools sensibly in the meantime.

Progress 8 measures the progress pupils make between the end of primary school and their GCSEs, compared with pupils nationally who had the same starting point. That starting point is their KS2 SATs results. The pupils who sat GCSEs in summer 2025 would have taken SATs in May 2020; the summer 2026 cohort in May 2021. Both sets of SATs were cancelled during the pandemic — so for these two year groups there is simply no baseline. No baseline, no progress measure. The Department for Education confirmed there would be no replacement measure for these years, and that Progress 8 returns with the 2026/27 results cycle.

The honest answer: attainment measures reward intake as much as teaching. A school with a high-attaining intake will post strong Attainment 8 numbers almost regardless of how well it teaches; a school doing heroic work with a disadvantaged intake can look mediocre on raw grades. Progress 8 existed precisely to correct for this — so while it's gone, borrow its logic:

Pupils who sat KS2 SATs in May 2022 take their GCSEs in summer 2027 — so Progress 8 returns with the performance data published in late 2027. Until then, School Atlas shows Attainment 8 and its trend as the headline secondary measure, clearly labelled by year, with an explanation of the Progress 8 gap on every affected Results tab.