What is a good Progress 8 score?

A Progress 8 score above +0.5 is considered well above average, +0.2 to +0.5 is above average, and -0.2 to +0.2 is broadly average. A score of 0 means pupils made the average amount of progress expected given their starting point at the end of primary school.

What is the difference between Progress 8 and Attainment 8?

Attainment 8 measures how highly pupils achieved across eight GCSE subjects. Progress 8 measures how much progress they made from their Key Stage 2 results to their GCSEs compared with similar pupils nationally. Progress 8 is generally the fairer measure of how well a school teaches because it accounts for the intake.

Which eight subjects count towards Attainment 8?

English and maths (each double-weighted), three English Baccalaureate subjects such as sciences, languages, history or geography, and three further approved GCSE or vocational qualifications.

Progress 8 and Attainment 8 Explained: A Parent’s Guide to Secondary School Performance

Progress 8 is the single most important number in English secondary school league tables — and the most misunderstood. Here is what it measures, what counts as good, and how to use it when choosing a school.

When you look up an English secondary school’s results, two numbers dominate: Progress 8 and Attainment 8. They are the Department for Education’s headline accountability measures, and understanding the difference between them changes how you read a school entirely.

What is Attainment 8?

Attainment 8 measures a pupil’s average achievement across eight GCSE-level qualifications. The eight slots are grouped into three buckets:

English and maths (double-weighted, so they count twice)
Three further qualifications from the English Baccalaureate subjects — sciences, computer science, history, geography and languages
Three further qualifications, which can be any approved GCSE or vocational qualification

A school’s Attainment 8 score is simply the average of these points across all its pupils. It tells you how highly the cohort achieved — but not how far those pupils travelled to get there.

What is Progress 8, and why it matters more

Progress 8 measures how much progress pupils made between the end of primary school (their Key Stage 2 SATs results) and their GCSEs, compared with other pupils nationally who had the same starting point. This is the fairer measure, because it accounts for the intake a school actually receives.

The score is built around zero:

0.0 means pupils made average progress — exactly what you would expect given their starting point.
A positive score (for example +0.5) means pupils made more progress than similar pupils nationally.
A negative score (for example -0.5) means they made less.

What counts as a good Progress 8 score?

As a rough guide used in school accountability: a score above +0.5 is well above average, between +0.2 and +0.5 is above average, between -0.2 and +0.2 is broadly average, and below -0.5 is well below average. A score of +1.0 means, on average, pupils achieved a full grade higher in every one of their eight subjects than similar pupils elsewhere.

Why a high Attainment 8 school is not always the ‘better’ school

A school in an affluent area with a high-attaining intake can post a strong Attainment 8 while adding relatively little — a modest or even negative Progress 8. A school serving a more mixed intake can have a lower Attainment 8 but a strongly positive Progress 8, meaning it is genuinely accelerating its pupils. If you want to know how well a school teaches, Progress 8 is the number to trust.

The caveats every parent should know

Small cohorts swing wildly. In a small school, a handful of pupils can move the score by several tenths in either direction. Look at three years of data, not one.
Progress 8 was suspended during the pandemic years. Data from 2020 and 2021 was not published in the usual way, so trends have a gap.
It says nothing about your child specifically. It is a cohort average, not a prediction for one pupil.

How to use these numbers when choosing a school

Start with Progress 8 to judge teaching effectiveness, cross-check with Attainment 8 to understand the cohort’s outcomes, then look beyond both: the destinations of leavers, the breadth of the curriculum, and what you see on a visit. On every SchoolFinder secondary listing we show these figures alongside the school’s Ofsted judgement so you can weigh them together.