What is benchmarking?

We are delighted to share a new analysis of your CENTURY usage. This shows your students’ attainment benchmarked against their peers across our community of schools. 

How are the benchmarking reports calculated?

Benchmarking reports are generated using the student's most recent score for an individual nugget. This score is then compared against the average achieved by peers, based on age and school type. This means it is a fair comparison that accounts for age, and for nugget difficulty. 

These average score differences are then aggregated in different ways.

In terms of content we can look:

• Subject e.g. English
• Course e.g. KS3 Reading Comprehension
• Topic e.g. Themes and Context
• Diagnostic

In terms of cohorts of students we can look at:

• Whole school
• Year group (based on date of birth)
• Class

How can I access benchmarking?

At present these benchmarking reports are only available through your dedicated account manager, if you would like to view the benchmarking for your school, please contact your account manager

Please note the data provided doesn’t take into account the full context of the school or classes at the present time, the data provided is indicative against the most recent student scores.

How should I use benchmarking?

Every school or college will have different ways to use benchmarking based on their unique context and circumstances.

We believe benchmarking offers numerous unique insights:

• Ability to identify areas of best practice, e.g. by identifying the highest scoring topic in a department
• Identify areas where students may be falling behind to inform interventions, without the need for additional summative testing. This is particularly useful in subjects or during phases without formal external assessmen
• Closer to exam periods, identify areas of relative strength or weakness

How much do we need to use CENTURY for this to be valid?

Benchmarking can be insightful even after a single diagnostic, which will enable you to immediately view a snapshot or achievement in the topic covered by the diagnostic.

To look more widely, at a topic or a whole course or subject, the more work a cohort has completed the more valuable and robust the insights will be, for this reason, we also provide the number of users alongside the average score differences.