📊KS4 Benchmark

Find any school in England that has KS4 results, then look at it from every side. Your choices are kept in the address bar, so a link opens the same view for a colleague.

The views

• Overview: headline results against England, the region, the LA, the school's similar schools and its trust, with significance and where the school sits nationally; three-year trends; the context-adjusted Attainment 8; strengths and priorities across pupil groups.
• Successes & challenges: the strongest evidence each way, sorted into “Build on” and “Investigate” with a question for review: results and pupil groups against the same pupils in England and the similar schools, changes on last year, subjects ranked among the similar schools and the LA's schools of the same type, attendance and suspensions. Then English and maths next steps (with a “what if pupils each gained a grade” calculator), the subject table, the disadvantaged review and all the evidence.
• Pupil groups: every published group (disadvantaged, boys, girls, EAL, non-mobile, high / middle / low prior attainers) against the same group in England, the region, the LA and the similar schools, with its rank among the similar schools.
• Similar schools: off until you choose a source. Paste your school's list of 50 from DfE's platform for exact IDSR comparisons, or switch on the stand-in model (an approximation from public data). Then see the group's results, the school's rank, a map and a chart. You can also save other lists of schools (local partners, for example).
• Compare: up to 12 schools side by side: cards, every measure on one chart, the full table and trends. Add schools by search, or in one click: the trust's schools, the most similar, the nearest.
• Area & league tables: rank the schools in an LA, region, trust, the similar group, the nearest 20, England or a saved list, as a table, an interactive map (hover for results, click to open a school), or a chart of any two measures (results, staffing, attendance, SEN…). Untick “include grammar schools” to leave selective schools out of every comparison group.
• Trusts: every multi-academy trust with KS4 schools, ranked on pupil-weighted results; open a trust to see its schools.
• Subjects: this school's subjects against England and the LA, or against its similar schools (with its rank among those offering each subject), or one subject across all the schools in an area or group, with a heat map of subjects by school. Grade 4+ is a share of all entries, as DfE publishes it.
• Destinations: where pupils went after Year 11, against the LA, region and England, including disadvantaged pupils.
• Staffing & context: pupil-teacher ratio, teaching assistants, teacher sickness absence, turnover, vacancies and pay; FSM, EAL and SEN; pupil absence and persistent absence; suspensions and exclusions. Each against the comparison group and England.

Reading the numbers

• Significance: green and red show differences from England that are unlikely to be chance. Progress 8 uses DfE's confidence intervals and bands. Percentages use the binomial standard error; Attainment 8 uses an approximate one (pupils' A8 spread nationally is about 19 points). Small cohorts rarely differ significantly.
• Progress 8 is published for 2023/24 only: pupils in the 2024/25 and 2025/26 cohorts had no KS2 tests (2020 and 2021).
• Context-adjusted Attainment 8 (not a DfE measure) fills that gap: it compares a school's A8 with what schools with a similar intake get (disadvantage, EAL, stability, prior-attainment mix, SEN), from a regression across all mainstream schools. +3 means three points above schools with that intake. It is an estimate: read it with the confidence it states.
• Pupils needed: for percentage measures, roughly how many more pupils would have had to reach the threshold to match England.
• “<5” or “–” is DfE suppression (too few pupils) or a measure that does not apply.
• Percentiles and league tables include state-funded mainstream schools only (not special, AP, independent or 16-19).

Similar schools (off until you choose a source)

• From 2026 IDSRs compare a school with 50 similar schools from DfE and Ofsted's similar schools model: the nearest 50 by weighted distance on nine whole-school measures. The IDSR shows the group's averages, not the schools' names, and DfE does not publish the lists.
• The model is new for the 2026 IDSR, and a school's list is for 2025/26 results, so similar-school comparisons are shown for 2025/26 only. (The IDSR has a different group for each year, chosen on that year's January census, so its figures for 2024 and 2025 come from other lists.)
• So similar-school comparisons are switched off until you choose one of two sources in the Similar schools tab. Your choice applies across Overview, Successes & challenges, Pupil groups, Subjects, Compare and Staffing & context.
• Option A, approximate: the stand-in model. A tick-box rebuilds a group of 50 for any school from public data (below). It is an approximation, so treat its figures as a guide.
• Option B, exact: DfE's list. Sign in to DfE's online platform for schools with your school's DfE Sign-in account, open your school's similar schools list, select it all and copy it, then paste it into Similar schools and press Save DfE list. The list as copied (school names, addresses and figures) is fine, as are URNs or names one per line. It is kept only in your browser, for that school, and always takes priority over the stand-in. With it, similar-school averages use the IDSR's group and the IDSR's method (the plain mean of the 51 schools' figures: the school itself and its 50): checked against one school's 2026 IDSR, every 2025/26 figure matched exactly. If you cannot sign in, ask your headteacher or data lead.
• How the stand-in works. Where DfE's measure is not public it uses the nearest public one: KS2 scores → the prior-attainment mix of the last Year 11 with KS2 results (2023/24); FSM6 → Year 11 disadvantaged % and whole-school FSM %; IDACI and POLAR4 → IDACI and the young people's education score (English indices of deprivation 2025) for the neighbourhoods round the school, with every small area shared between its three nearest mainstream secondaries. Like DfE's, the group is chosen once, on 2024/25 data, and kept for every year's results.
• Because some stand-ins are weaker than DfE's own data, its weights differ from DfE's: the KS2 stand-in (pupils who took KS2 in 2019, not Years 7 to 9) gets 24% rather than 46%, and disadvantage, the public measure most closely tied to KS2 and POLAR4, takes up the difference (40%). Hover over “similar schools” to see both sets of weights.
• Checked against DfE's actual list for one school (used only for the test, not stored here), the stand-in shared about a third of DfE's 50, and its averages came within about half a point of the IDSR's. Getting closer would need Years 7 to 9's KS2 scores and pupils' home areas, which are not public.

Methods: the IDSR's wherever the data allows

• Same as the IDSR: the IDSR's wording and bands throughout (KS4: Above / Close to average / Below at 0.5 standard deviations of schools' results, with sig+ / sig- / non-sig; context: Well above to Well below average); national figures for KS4 are DfE's national results; Progress 8 bands use DfE's confidence intervals; attendance, persistent absence and suspension benchmarks are rates for all state-funded secondary schools (total of the numerator over the total of the denominator), not averages of schools; suspensions use the IDSR's measure, the percentage of pupils with one or more suspensions, with its banding (more than 0.5 standard deviations from national = Above / Below) and significance (sig+ / sig-).
• Where this tool differs, because the data the IDSR uses is not public:
  • Similar schools: with DfE's list pasted in, the group is the IDSR's. With the stand-in model instead, the group is rebuilt from public stand-ins for KS2 scores, FSM6, IDACI and POLAR4 (see above) and is an approximation: in one school's check it shared about a third of DfE's 50, with Attainment 8 averages within 0.5 of the IDSR's in each year. Both are off by default.
  • Significance for Attainment 8 and the KS4 percentages is approximate (a standard error from pupils' national spread, or the binomial); the IDSR uses pupil-level data.
  • Attendance is the autumn and spring terms (DfE's school-level file); the IDSR shows full years and, for the current year, the autumn term.
  • National suspension rates are added up from the school-level file, so can differ from the IDSR's published national figure by a few hundredths of a percentage point.
  • The standard deviation behind the bands is of mainstream schools with KS4 results, not all state-funded secondaries.
  • The context strip under the school's name uses the IDSR's national distribution banding (Well above / Above / Close to / Below / Well below average at 0.5 and 1 standard deviations from the national figure). The standard deviation is of mainstream schools with KS4 results; where DfE publishes no national rate for a measure (disadvantaged %, stability and prior attainment of the KS4 cohort) the national figure is the pupil-weighted average of those schools.
  • Where DfE publishes no denominator (staff numbers, vacancies), England, region and LA are medians of state-funded secondaries, marked “median”.
  • Context-adjusted Attainment 8, trust comparisons, subjects across schools, staffing and destinations are not in the IDSR.

Thanks

• This tool grew from the ideas in KS4 Compare, C Payne's independent site for comparing schools' KS4 results from the same DfE data. Do take a look at it too.

Where the data comes from, and how fresh it is

• KS4 results, subjects and destinations come live from DfE's statistics API each time, kept in this browser for a week (⟳ Refresh data fetches it again).
• Trusts, school types and locations (GIAS) and staffing, SEN, absence and suspensions are refreshed when the tools in the tools folder are run: about once a term, or after DfE's releases (workforce and SEN in June, suspensions in July, absence in spring).