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00:00Hello, my name is Amber Allitt and I'm a journalist specializing in education.
00:05The government has now released its performance figures for sixth form schools and colleges
00:10based on how their students did in their A-levels in the most recent academic year.
00:14I'm going to tell you about one of the measures included in this data that is commonly used
00:18to rank schools by performance, the A-level point score.
00:23The point score used to rank sixth forms is the average number of performance points per
00:27A-level entry by any given school's students.
00:31Performance points are a unique measurement calculated by multiplying size, or the average
00:36length of time it takes to teach a qualification, and challenge, the level of the qualification
00:42and the grade achieved.
00:44This is helpful because it means that performance points can be used to compare schools even
00:48if they study different qualifications with different grading systems.
00:53For A-levels, however, the point score ends up lining up with the different letter grades
00:58that students are able to achieve.
01:00The most points are able to get is 60, which is the equivalent to the top A-star grade.
01:06A score of 50 is like an A, while 40 is a B, 30 is a C, 20 is a D, and 10 is an E, with
01:14fails not receiving any points.
01:16This means that it's possible to say a college had a B average, for example, if their average
01:21point score comes out over 40, with the letters often further broken down into B+, or B-,
01:27to show how close they were to different grades.
01:31It is worth noting that this is just one way you can compare school performance.
01:35Sixth forms are now also able to be compared using a new progress score, which represents
01:39how much students have progressed since they sat their GCSEs, so it's definitely worth
01:44checking out some of these as well.
01:51For more information, visit www.pearsonschools.co.uk