General

These Tables provide the exam results for secondary school pupils who are at the end of KS4. In the majority of schools, those pupils in Year 11 in the 2009/10 school year are at the end of KS4. For each local authority (LA), schools are listed alphabetically, with special schools shown separately at the end of each list.

If your child already attends a school listed in the Tables, you may be interested to see how its results compare with other schools in the area, and with the LA and national averages. You can also see, at a glance, how each school's results have changed over the past four years.

You may want to discuss the results with teachers at your child's school - how do they feel the school is performing, and what plans do they have to improve levels of achievement? How can you support the work of the school? What more can you do to help your own child do better?

The Performance Tables website now enables you to sort schools in rank order under each performance indicator; to search for types of school; download underlying data; and access school by school spend data for 2009-10, showing how much individual schools spend on things such as teaching staff, catering and ICT.

Choosing a school

If you are considering local secondary schools for your child, you will find helpful information in the Tables about the performance of schools in your area. However, the Tables provide only part of the picture of each school's overall achievements and cannot provide a prediction of future performance. You can get a better overall impression of a school by also reading school prospectuses, reports of recent Ofsted inspections and by visiting schools and talking to teachers.

The Key Stage 4 Performance Tables give more than one measure of a school's performance. These measures can be considered alongside each other when evaluating the performance of a school. "How to read the Tables" and the following sections describe what is published for each school and explains how to interpret the information and what conclusions can be drawn from the information given.

You will find more information on how the measures in the Tables are calculated; the National Curriculum; the National Qualifications Framework; adjustments to number of pupils on roll; and Special Educational Needs; in the 'More Information' section of this website.

Expected levels of secondary school performance

The government assesses mainstream maintained secondary schools’ performance against defined “floor standards”. Considered against these, a school would be seen as “underperforming” if its Key Stage 4 results are:

  • less than 35% of pupils at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4) achieving 5 or more GCSEs A*-C (or equivalents) including English and maths GCSE; and
  • below average % of pupils at the end of KS4 making expected progress in English (national median for 2010 = 72%); and
  • below average % of pupils at the end of KS4 making expected progress in maths (national median for 2010 = 65%)