How to set up the 24/25 and 25/26 cohorts without KS2 Data (Admin)

Due to the impact of the pandemic, the 24/25 and 25/26 cohorts do not have any official KS2 data to use when setting up these cohorts in Analytics. There are two main options available to you in setting up these cohorts, depending on what functionality you want to get out of the reports.

Please note: for all cohorts other than 24/25 and 25/26, you should never put a KS2 score in Sisra for a student who doesn’t have one. The DfE will not report Progress 8 for students without KS2 data, and you will therefore produce an inaccurate reflection of your cohort by including results which do not exist.

Option 1/ Skip Uploading KS2 Data Entirely

The DfE have confirmed that headline measures that require KS2 data to be calculated, such as Progress 8, will not be officially reported on for these cohorts, and so you can simply skip uploading any KS2 baselines. You would still be able to generate other official headlines in the report this way, such as EBacc figures, Basics 9-5, etc.

You would still need to upload EAP Baselines in order to create your EAPs, as the EAPs are an essential part of the setup. There are several different options you can use as the EAP baselines (you can see more details of these options in our article here), but the most common option for schools who do not use the KS2 Baseline is to use Target baselines. This allows you to create a unique EAP for each subject.

This would involve preparing an Excel file of your students' target grades, and then going to DATA > select keystage and cohort > KS2/EAP > Uploads and clicking on 'Upload Grades File'. You can then select the file that contains your target grades, which will need to be a CSV (MS-DOS) file.

You can then select your Targets grade file to upload, which will need to have been saved as a CSV (MS-DOS) file to be accepted. You can see more about preparing an EAP baseline file for uploading in our article here. You will then need to enter a clear file title, and then click 'Upload'.

During the upload process, Analytics will perform a file health check, which will inform you of issues found in the file. We recommend checking this, as well as checking the number of students and qualifications listed in the upload summary are as you expect for this file. If there are issues, then you can view further details by clicking ‘Show/Hide Warnings’. You can click ‘Cancel the upload’, address the issues, and then re-upload the amended file. For more information on these potential issues, see here - EAP File Health Check Issues (Admin).

However, if you are happy with the file (or want to address issues in Analytics where possible) and you have checked the upload summary, click ‘Continue with the upload’.

Once your targets file has been uploaded, you will need to go to KS2/EAP > Baselines > Baseline Management. All of your baseline qualifications will currently be highlighted red because they have not been set up with a Grade Type and Grade Method.

To set up these baselines, click on the blue 'Edit' button, and you can then select 'KS3/4 Method' in the Grade Type dropdown box and select the relevant Grade Method in that dropdown box. When you have completed this for all baseline qualifications, you can then click 'Save'.

Now that your Target EAP Baselines are set up, you can then move on to creating your EAPs as normal. You can see full details on creating an EAP in our article here - KS3/4: Creating EAPs (Admin)

Option 2/ Create Alternative Baselines for Internal Analysis

If you would like to generate headline figures such as Progress 8 and Value Added for your own internal analysis, some schools have opted to create their own KS2 Scores to upload to Analytics in place of Scaled Scores. As there is no official guidance from the DfE on doing this, we cannot recommend a specific way of creating your own KS2 Scores, but some of the options used by schools are:

• Using CAT4 or other baseline tests to provide a retrospective indication of what the KS2 scaled scores might have been
• Comparing the students' performance to other students who do have KS2 Scaled Scores to work out what their scores might have been

As long as the baseline scores that you create fall between the approved Scaled Scores of 59 to 120, you can then upload these baselines to Analytics and treat them in the same way you would Scaled Scores. You would need to create two baseline qualifications for this to work - 1 for Maths and 1 for English Reading.

Once you have prepared your baselines, you would then need to go to KS2/EAP > Uploads and click on 'Upload Grades File' to upload your file (which will need to be a CSV (MS-DOS) file type). Enter a clear file title to make it easy to identify what this upload is, and then click 'Upload'.

During the upload process, Analytics will perform a file health check, which will inform you of issues found in the file. We recommend checking this, as well as checking the number of students and qualifications listed in the upload summary are as you expect for this file. If there are issues, then you can view further details by clicking ‘Show/Hide Warnings’. You can click ‘Cancel the upload’, address the issues, and then re-upload the amended file. For more information on these potential issues, see here - KS2 Core Baselines: File Health Check Issues (Admin).

However, if you are happy with the file (or want to address issues in Analytics where possible) and you have checked the upload summary, click ‘Continue with the upload’.

Once the file has uploaded, you can then go to KS2/EAP > Baselines > Baseline Management and then click on 'Edit' to set up your baselines. You will need to select 'Scaled Scores' as the Grade Type, and that will then allow you to nominate these baselines in the Core dropdown box as appropriate.

Then click 'Save' and your new baselines will be set up to use for the purposes of calculating headline figures for your internal analysis. You can then proceed to creating your EAPs however you normally do in your school. For more on creating EAPs, you can see our section on this here.

Thanks for reading!