Why some schools don't have a Progress 8 score right now

If you've noticed a secondary school's Progress 8 score is simply missing, showing a dash instead of a number, you haven't stumbled on a data error and it isn't a red flag specific to that school. It's a nationwide gap, and it comes down to one thing: the pandemic.

How Progress 8 is calculated

Progress 8 measures how much a pupil improved between the end of primary school and their GCSEs, by comparing their actual GCSE results against how similar pupils performed nationally, given the same starting point. That starting point comes from a pupil's Key Stage 2 SATs results, taken at the end of Year 6.

The calculation depends entirely on that starting-point data existing. No KS2 baseline, no Progress 8 score.

Where the gap comes from

Key Stage 2 SATs were cancelled nationally in 2020 and 2021, due to school closures during the pandemic. Any pupil who would have sat those tests in those years — meaning they're now finishing their GCSEs in the 2024/25 and 2025/26 academic years — simply doesn't have the KS2 data Progress 8 needs as its starting point.

The Department for Education confirmed there would be no substitute measure created to fill the gap for these two cohorts. Progress 8 is expected to return from the 2026/27 academic year onward, once a cohort with genuine KS2 baseline data reaches their GCSEs again.

What to look at in the meantime

The absence of a Progress 8 score doesn't mean there's nothing to go on — it just means you should lean on the measures that don't depend on a KS2 baseline:

• Attainment 8 — still fully available, and tells you how strong this year's actual results were
• EBacc Average Point Score — a similar raw-attainment measure focused on a specific set of academic subjects
• Basic pass rates — the percentage of pupils achieving a grade 4 or grade 5 in both English and maths
• The school's last available Progress 8 score, from 2022/23 or 2023/24 — not perfectly current, but still a genuine indicator of how the school has performed on this measure in the recent past

The one thing worth remembering

This gap affects every secondary school in England equally for these two cohorts — it says nothing about any individual school's quality. A school showing no Progress 8 score right now isn't hiding poor performance; it's simply part of a data gap the entire country is dealing with at the same time. Normal service, in this respect, resumes in 2026/27.