Further analysis of 2021 National Reference Tests
Study of year 11 English and maths performance in 2021 compared with 2020, and perceptions from 2021.
Ofqual has today published the National Foundation for Educational Research’s (NFER’s) further analyses of 2021’s National Reference Test (NRT) in English and maths, and an analysis of year 11 and year 13 students’ views of disruption caused by the pandemic.
The NRT is taken every year from February to March by a nationally representative sample of year 11 students in England. The tests measure attainment in English and maths and provide objective evidence of changes in attainment over time.
The NRT in 2020 was largely unaffected by the pandemic, as it took place before schools were closed for the first national lockdown. In 2021, when exams could not take place for the second year running, the NRT took place later than usual, from mid-April to mid-May.
The main NRT outcomes, published last year, showed the overall performance for the NRT in 2021 in English and maths. There was no significant change in the overall performance in English for students in 2021 compared with students in 2020. There was a statistically significant drop in the overall performance in maths of students in 2021 compared with students in 2020.
A further study provides additional analyses to explore whether parts of the English language and maths curriculum were impacted differently. For English, the analysis compared relative performance between reading and writing as well as relative performance across the different assessment objectives. It found that there was no evidence of any clear differences across the curriculum areas or assessment objectives.
For maths, the analysis investigated whether the drop in performance was a result of larger decreases in performance in specific areas of the maths curriculum, or smaller decreases in performance across all curriculum areas. Performance dropped by a small amount for all areas of the curriculum in maths between 2020 and 2021.
The analysis found variability at school, class and student level. As the extent of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic-related disruption was variable at the school, class and even student level, the absence of a clear pattern in changes in performance at the curriculum level for English and mathematics is perhaps unsurprising.
The second report considered whether there was evidence that some groups of students, or schools, were affected more than others by disruption. NFER found that when looking at the NRT results:
- there was no significant change in the relationship between the socio-economic status of the student and performance, but in maths, students in schools with higher proportions of students eligible for free school meals saw a greater decline in performance in the NRT at grades 5 and 7
- the relationships between NRT performance and previous school and student performance did not change significantly across the 2 years
- students with English as an additional language (EAL) saw a significantly greater decline in maths performance in the NRT at grade 7 than students with English as a first language
- the relationships between gender, ethnicity and students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and performance on the NRT had not changed significantly between the 2 years
- the type of school (for example, academies, free schools), urban versus rural, and school size were not significant predictors of performance on the NRT, and nor did the relationship between these variables and performance change significantly across the years
- the pattern of changes in performance across NRT English regions is difficult to unpick, but there was evidence to suggest the proportion of students achieving grade 4 and above in maths in the NRT dropped more in the north-west compared to the reference region of the East Midlands
- there was a significant relationship between school-level absence rates and likelihood of students achieving at or above grade 4 in English in the NRT, but this relationship was weakened significantly in 2021, compared with 2020
Ofqual also took steps to gather the views of students and teachers to learn more about their perceptions of the pandemic. A further piece of Ofqual-commissioned research, by Dr Tina Isaacs from UCL Institute of Education and Professor Roger Murphy from Nottingham University, explored the views of students, parents and teachers.
The research notes that individual students on similar courses in similar, or the same, schools and colleges reported “very different accounts” of their experiences. It may be read in conjunction with Ofqual research and analysis of the effectiveness of teacher assessed grades in summer 2021, which includes surveys and interviews with teachers and students.