How to analyse school performance data in England: A guide for school leaders

Analysing school performance means looking at your school’s attainment and progress data to see how pupils are doing, spot where support is needed, and evidence your impact to governors, trustees and Ofsted.

This guide covers what ASP shows, how to read attainment against progress, and why schools track both throughout the year rather than waiting for ASP and IDSR's annual update.

For secondary schools in England, three sources matter most:

ASP

DfE’s Analyse School Performance (ASP) service - the official outcomes data.

IDSR

The Inspection Data Summary Report (IDSR) - Ofsted’s version of the same data.

Your own tracking data

Pupil-level information from your MIS or tracking software.

What is the Analyse School Performance (ASP) service?

ASP is DfE’s official service for reviewing a school’s performance data, accessed through DfE Sign-in. For secondary schools, it covers Key Stage 4 outcomes - Attainment 8, Progress 8, EBacc, destination measures & attainment in English & Maths. These are broken down by subject and pupil group, with pupil-level detail available to staff with the right access.

Senior leaders and named staff usually get full access; governors are typically given a more limited set of reports. Local authorities and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) use ASP too, alongside IDSR, mainly to prepare for Ofsted inspections and internal reviews.

It’s a different service to GOV.UK’s Compare School and College Performance, which is the public site parents use to look up any school’s published results. ASP is the detailed version and one of several sources schools use to analyse their own data.

The one limitation worth knowing: ASP is built around a single annual data collection, published months after the exams it reports on. It tells you how last year’s Year 11 did - not how this year’s Year 10 mocks are shaping up.

See how FFT Aspire Pupil Tracking fills that gap

Attainment vs Progress: What school performance data actually shows

Two different figures both get called “school performance data” and mixing them up leads schools astray.

Attainment - Attainment 8, GCSE pass rates, EBacc achievement - shows the grades pupils achieved. Progress, mainly Progress 8, compares those grades against what pupils with similar starting points achieved nationally. A school with high attainment but average progress may simply have a high-attaining intake. A school with modest attainment but strong progress may be adding more value than the headline grades suggest.

FFT’s Education Datalab has found a strong link (r=0.85) between Attainment 8 scores and pupils' mean KS2 scores on entry - one reason progress data, tracked consistently, gives a fairer picture of a school’s impact than a single annual attainment figure.

If you want to compare your results against genuinely similar schools rather than the national average, FFT’s “Schools Like Yours” tool is built for that. And for a fuller look at what school performance data can and can’t tell you, FFT Education Datalab’s “Making sense of school performance data” is worth a read.

Why annual data isn't the full picture

ASP and IDSR are both fixed to one annual round of exam results. That's useful for accountability since every school is compared on the same basis at the same time. It's less useful day to day: a Year 11 pupil who starts to slip in November won't show up in ASP until the following autumn - by which point their GCSEs and any other KS4 qualifications will already have been taken.

Insights from FFT Education Datalab

The practical takeaway from FFT’s research is simple: because attainment tracks so closely with where pupils started, progress is the more honest measure of impact - and it’s far more useful gathered continuously than analysed once a year, after the outcomes are already fixed.

How to analyse school performance data: A practical approach

There are many ways for schools to analyse their data, but a consistent approach helps:

1. Start with the headline measures in ASP - Attainment 8, Progress 8, EBacc and attainment in English & Maths give you the national picture.

2. Break results down by subject and pupil group, since whole-school figures can hide where gaps really are. Prioritise Progress 8 as your headline measure - but keep attainment in view too, since it explains what's driving the progress score

3. Compare with similar schools using a tool like "Schools Like Yours", and the FFT Similar Schools report rather than the national average alone.

4. Check your own tracking data too. ASP tells you what happened last year; tracking tells you how this year’s cohort is doing (i.e. it’s not just about the ‘live’ Y11 cohort).

5. Act on it. Identify the pupils in your cohort who need support and set a date to check whether it’s working.

Tracking attainment and pupil progress throughout the year in secondary schools

Tracking pupil progress in secondary schools means keeping a live, current view — not just an annual one. Secondary schools have a lot happening between ASP updates: option choices, mock exams, coursework checkpoints, and interventions that start and finish mid-year. None of it shows up in ASP until the following autumn.

This is where ongoing tracking helps. Schools track attainment and pupil progress every term rather than waiting for the next annual update. FFT Aspire Pupil Tracking gives schools a live view of attainment and progress, benchmarked against national data and FFT's own estimates, so you can find out who needs support as it happens. It covers Key Stages 3 to 5, so the same standardised view carries on into sixth form too.

What real-time tracking looks like in practice

In practice, it means checking a pupil, subject or cohort's current progress whenever you need to, benchmarked against national data and FFT's own estimates, rather than waiting for the next data collection. That includes SENDCOs and pastoral leads too: a pupil with SEND or EAL who's falling behind can be spotted as the pattern emerges, not months later at the next review.

Spot pupils falling behind as it happens

See how FFT Aspire Pupil Tracking gives you that ongoing picture across Key Stages 3 to 5.

See Pupil Tracking

Online pupil tracking: Comparing results against national data

Many schools use spreadsheets alongside their tracking system. FFT Aspire Pupil Tracking adds to this by mapping your teaching groups automatically from your MIS, so results can be uploaded and compared — by pupil, subject or cohort — against national data and FFT's own estimates, with less manual admin. FFT Aspire has been used by schools since 2014, and its pupil tracking module alone was used by more than 1,600 schools at GCSE level and 750+ at sixth form in FFT’s 2025 Summer Results Service — a good sign of how many school leaders have already made this move.

ASP / IDSR	FFT Aspire Pupil Tracking
Updated once a year	Updated throughout the year
Whole-cohort view	Whole-cohort and pupil-level view
Shows how last year’s leavers did	Shows how this year’s pupils are doing

Analysing school performance data: FAQs for school leaders

Progress shows how much pupils have improved relative to their starting point — Progress 8 is the headline measure at GCSE, but schools track progress at every key stage. Attainment shows the grades or scores pupils have achieved, whether that's GCSE results, Attainment 8, or assessment scores earlier in secondary school. A school can have modest attainment but strong progress, meaning it's adding more value than the headline grades alone suggest.