Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has made an assessment of the impact of the changes to the publication of secondary school and college results data on parents ability to choose a school place for their children.

Parents are being provided with secondary school and college data on a similar timetable to previous years. Secondary school performance data was published on 20 October 2022 and 16-18 school and college data will be published on 2 February 2023.

While it is important that the Department returns to publishing such data, we also recognise that a school or college’s performance data may be affected by the uneven impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, the Department has removed the comparison tables, added caveats about treating the data with caution and changed the name of the website to Find School and College Performance Data to reduce the emphasis on comparison.

These changes were informed by the Department’s user research with parents of students in years 5, 7, 12 and 13. This showed parents understood that data from this year should be considered alongside a range of other information about the school or college and its individual circumstances.