Intelligence - Virtual School

The intelligence page of Insight gives you both an overview and also the detail of significance testing of the results and data for your LA's virtual school. 

Significance testing is used in order to determine whether your value for an indicator is a strength, a challenge or within normal bounds. It illustrates data elements that you will want to be aware of such as areas of weakness in otherwise good results, or alternatively strengths in what otherwise appears to be a poor year. 

If you want more information about how significance is calculated, please see this article. 

Options

There are two options you can change on this page.

Ac. Year

There will be a maximum of 3 academic years at any given point. The current academic year will be available as soon as absence data becomes available in Nexus, later being populated by the attainment results for the virtual school. (Note that data for 2019/20 and 2020/21 were limited by the cancellation of all statutory assessments in that year).

Dimension

Select Gap to National if you are only concerned with how your virtual school has performed against the national CLA cohort or Year on Year Trend if you are only concerned with performance against the previous year. When selecting the default - All Dimensions - both will be displayed for each indicator. 

School Summary

The top of this page shows a summary of the significance testing performed on your virtual school according to the dimensions that you have selected in Options.

For example, when considering absence in the screenshot below, there are 8 possible points of significance. This is because there are 4 absence indicators, and each is tested for 2 dimensions if both are selected (Gap to National and Year on Year Trend).

In this example, for absence, both strengths and challenges are relatively low compared to the possible points of significance. There are more indicators that are within normal bounds (represented in grey on the bar). Where there are no significant indicators - either for strengths or challenges - Insight makes this clear (see Phonics in the screen shot above).

Areas

Click on an area in the School Summary section to jump to the corresponding area on the lower portion of the page or simply scroll down to view each area in turn.

Strengths and challenges show in 2 columns. Strengths are in green on the left and challenges in red on the right. Each indicator is tested for significance and the result will be displayed. If there are no strengths or challenges, this will be stated. 

Hint:

Remember that being within normal bounds is an entirely acceptable result and should not be read as a failure. Omission from strengths or challenges actually represents performance of a decent standard compared to either the prior year and/or the national average depending on the dimensions selected.

The virtual school in the example below is significant because their Key Stage 4 English & Maths 5+ is significantly lower than the national average for other CLA pupils. 

Hint:

It is possible to have both a strength and a challenge in the same indicator across different dimensions. For example where there had been a significant improvement from prior year performance but the result remained significantly below national average gap, the same indicators might show on both sides, one Gap to National and the other Year on Year trends. This isn't contradictory, it's actually telling it's own story. 

Virtual School cohort sizes

In most Local Authorities the cohort size for the virtual school in any given assessment year will be substantially smaller than many schools in your area or across the country. Small cohort sizes, with pupils who have significant challenges in their lives and often additional needs, mean that results from year to year will show may show substantial variations. Large rises or drops in results can be particularly emphatic in triggering the significance tests on this page (both for Gap to National and Year on Year trend) but should be seen in the context of that small cohort and their individual circumstances. As a virtual head you will probably wish to caveat any analysis on this basis, whether that looking at high numbers or strengths or challenges in a given area. 

Key articles in this guide

Insight Headlines - Virtual School:  key data visualised and reinterpreted for access to a wider audience. 

Insight Data Sources & Methodology Virtual School: where data comes from and how significance is calculated

Insight CLA Cohort: contextual information from school census, SSDA903 and NPD attainment outcomes