Indicator Updates September 2026

There has always been a significant and positive correlation between student’s scores in reasoning and attainment tests and their school performance, as measured by national tests or public examinations. 

School leaders find it valuable to be able to anticipate potential outcomes for both large cohorts of children and individual students themselves, at aggregated and individual subject levels. They can also identify where student performance aligns and does not align with anticipated outcomes. 

Within some of our reports, we provide indicative grades for Key Stage 2 testing, GCSE and A level. For customers in some parts of the world, we also provide indicators relating to AS levels, CBSE, International Baccalaureate Middle Years and Diploma Programmes, Irish Leavers Certificate and National Tests in devolved administrations of the UK.

The following information relates to updates to our indicators made in September 2026 and is accurate as of 08/09/2026.

Our indicators - for Key Stage 2 SATs, GCSEs and A levels - have recently been updated based on a national data set made available to us relating to the results of students that completed statutory examinations in England in 2023. 

Where the devolved administrations of Wales and Northern Ireland retain a non-linear structure to AS and A levels, we retain previous AS level indicators for these countries only.

Nothing has changed in-platform with regards to how indicators are accessed via reports; the way indicators are selected is still the same.   

Absolutely not! Any reports generated before our recent updates will have given an indication of potential academic achievement based on robust data with strong correlations between results in our tests and the statutory examinations on which they reported. We update these to ensure that such statistical analyses are based on as contemporary a data set as is available to us. 

Since the updated indicators are derived from more recent examinations data, we would recommend schools run reports again for any cohorts for which these insights may be useful.

Reports may now suggest that some students are likely to attain slightly different grades than previously thought. These variances are based on our updated statistical analysis. There are many factors that influence student attainment in statutory examinations and any such differences in individual student or aggregated group indicators will reflect these. 

Due to the volumes of data we have been able to access, indicators now exist for a number of subjects where they did not before.  

At GCSE, these subjects are: Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Latin, Urdu. 

At A-level, indicators now exist for: Fine Art, Music, Photography and Spanish. 

For different reasons, some subjects that we had previously been able to report on are no longer present within our indicators, largely due to student sample sizes available to us. 

At GCSE, these subjects are: Citizenship Studies, Computer Science, Design and Technology, ICT and Sociology.  

Regarding computing-based qualifications, in spite of its popularity, there is no accessible national data set for this subject. 

At A-level, subjects no longer present in reporting are Classical Civilisation and Latin, both due to issues of small sample sizes. 

AS Level indicators have been removed for most reports, but retained for customers using reporting flows relating to Wales and Northern Ireland. This is due to changes within AS / A level examinations affecting the volume of students completing AS levels that are now standalone in England (AS and A level examinations are now decoupled). 

AS level indicators that have been retained for devolved administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland continue to be based on previous statistical analysis. 

In 2014, the Department for Education removed national curriculum levels with the introduction of a new curriculum. This removed the agreed national assessment framework for schools and left the old levelling system redundant. We have therefore decided to remove these legacy metrics from our reports. 

These updates have been made using only data made available to us in England’s National Pupil Database. Updates to other indicators will be communicated as and when we are able to make them. 

This depends on the availability of examinations data. Ideally, this would be carried out regularly, although we had to make decisions about the appropriateness of this in light of the global pandemic and its longer-term impact on how examinations were conducted and their outcomes. This is why we chose to wait before updating our indicators of potential academic achievement, until exam results had stabilised and administration processes had become more consistent. 

The standardisation is not affected and SAS scores remain the same. It is this data that is used to compare outcomes in our assessments with outcomes in statutory examinations.  

‘Most likely’ grades are calculated to be the average performance of students with the same underlying ability profile as indicated by CAT4. ‘If challenged’ grades are consistent with performance in the top 25% of students with the same underlying CAT4 profile. 

Grades are provided to 1 decimal place so that schools can understand if each indicative grade could be considered to be fairly secure or otherwise. For example, a ‘most likely’ grade of 5.2 in maths suggests that the student is likely to attain at the lower end of grade 5 based on their test performance, but also has a high chance of obtaining grade 4 in the subject. Likewise, an indicative grade of 5.8 would suggest that grade 5 is most likely but that grade 6 could be a distinct possibility (and more so than grade 4). 

If you were to round the indicative grades, it would be most useful to round down in all cases, since even an indicator of 6.9 reflects the fact that CAT4 performance would suggest grade 6 to be the most likely outcome.