"Good" state secondary when looking at league tables?

DS2's school (mentioned upthread) also gets lower than 70% A*-to-C-inc-Egn-and-Maths (we need a shorthand for that!).

They do, though, have a truly vast range of extracurricular activities and opportunities, a hugely robust line on bullying and bad behaviour, and a welcoming attitude to parents and children alike.

In DS2's case, I suspect this means he may well be having just too good a time to be concentrating on hitting the top grades. I don't remember ever waking up as a schoolchild and saying, 'Yay, Thursday, double science, drama, choir and English, life is good!' (but then I wasn't quite that sort of dramatic teenage show-off).

cory
Good on her. PSC is great for many people but by no means all. Where have you decided on (coded answer is fine!)
BTW did you see the splendid coverage of the purple school and their visiting speaker. NOT.

i went with the 70 per cent too op i didn't go and feel the vibe - i thought my dcs could get that part right iyswim

Dd's school is not as high as 70%, yet I consider it a very good school indeed. One reason for its lower grades (still among the best in the city) may be that it has a very good reputation for pastoral support, so it attracts families with medical issues. This doesn't necessarily mean any other child will get their studies disrupted: dd is hard-working and ambitious and certainly not disruptive; she just misses a lot of school due to illness. We appealed to get into this school for this reason and I know others who applied out of catchment for similar reasons.

I agree with what Talkin said about the vibes. It's not just about which school is the best one in general, either, but which school will be best for your child.

We have just been looking at Sixth Form Colleges, and dd has decided she is not going to apply to the most prestigious top result one, because she feels another one would get more out of her.

Muminlondon
indeed - IGCSEs must have not been included as I do believe that the school that happygardening pays lots of money for gets better results than my comp!!
BUT
Comps when they are truly that (with the bus picking up from millionaires row each morning) then the results for all the children
academic / sporty / arty / musical / you name it : are fab
something that selective schools miss out on by being too narrow.

They seem to compare well with the independents! I think the 2012 league tables will include all the IGCSE equivalents (not all boards were accredited for the 2011 tables). What private schools don't reveal are all their figures for FSM or SEN (big fat zeros), attainment level on leaving primary school, value added...

creamteas - yup we had a couple of them in Soton - but they got turned into mixed sex academies! They are still pretty unusual.

But all those who say comps have dire results seem to have gone ever so quiet since I posted the Hampshire page
and my DCs school is NOT the top one!

Talking my DC are all at non-religious single sex comps and we don't live in London

Look at the Value added, and ask each school about their SEN department and how many per year have SEN, and what results they achieve, then ask about their G&T pupils, how many they have on average per year, and the results they achieve.

On paper, my local Secondary (almost fully Comp, except the highest lvl 6/7's will have gone to the superselective Grammar) has a not so good value added, despite being 'Good with Outstanding areas'.

In practice, even their SEN pupils are achieving 5 A*-G's. and most if those will be D and above, despite pupils like my DD starting that are 4/5 years behind their peers.

Their SEN Dept is amazing.

However, very few of their G&T pupils achieve a clutch of A*'s.

So that's why their Value Added slips down.

Best school in the town if you have a DC with SEN's, best school in the town if you have an average DC, not so great if you have a high flyer.

I personally think Value Added combined with knowledge about which groups of DC's do well FOR THEM in the school is the best measure of a school.

creamteas
single sex schools are generally only Catholic (at least in name outside London) or fee paying.

if you look at the Hampshire stats I linked to above, all of the top performing state schools are mixed sex comps : who have the economies of scale to offer fantastic education to bright kids
and support and opportunities to less bright kids

the nice lady from the Daily Mail a while back who wrote about losing her house to pay for private school lived in the Bohunt catchment ....

NB
statistically, anything over 33% Ebacc is really rather good because of the breadth of learning skills it requires in the pupils in a non selective school
www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/education/school_tables/secondary/11/html/bacc_850.stm?compare=

The other thing to remember when looking at league tables is that it is not easy to compare single sex and mixed schools.

Overall girls get better results than boys at GCSE. So even if the results for boys and girls were exactly average, the single sex girls schools would appear better than mixed and single sex boys schools would be lower.

That is why I would always suggest clicking onto the Dfe data page and looking at VA, ESL, FSM, top middle bottom, spend per pupil

and MOST importantly of all, stand outside the school gate at kicking out time and see if the 'vibe' feels right
(bearing in mind that 1500 teenagers will always be intimidating but they can be 'happy' intimidating or just unpleasant)

It depends SO much on the individual school.

Our local secondary - technically a secondary modern, because I live in a county which still has superselective grammar schools - gets over 80% 5 A* to C almost every year, and broke 90% this year.

HOWEVER, it is a relatively small school in a VERY affluent catchment, with a very small percentage of pupils on FSM or with SEN. The above results prpobably represent not much more than 'expected' results given their intake.

On the other hand, another school I know of, in one of the most deprived areas of the country, with an exceptionally high percentage of children on FSM and a very, very strong policy of inclusion (including taking lots of children that other schools have given up on, including re-admitting children who have spent years in PRUs) obtained just under 40% on this measure - and in terms of what the school itself contributed to each pupil's progress, it is a much 'better' school than my local one....

Headline statistics are a very blunt instrument...

Have a look at this page
www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/education/school_tables/secondary/11/html/five_gcses_850.stm?compare=
Knowing quite a few of the state comps on that list, anything above 62% getting 5GCSEs is cool
My DCs school got nearly 80%
NB Hampshire has NO selective state schools

if you look at the states for the areas of each school, you can see what you could expect in your area

I've just had a look at the 2011 league tables and filtered out independents, faith and selectives. I think there are still some partially selectives in the top 100 and intake for those schools is definitely higher attaining and least deprived. Two schools stand out - Mossbourne and Bethnal Green Technology college. In fact, from 2012 provisional stats there are some amazing results for Lambeth, Hackney and Tower Hamlets even before you adjust for intake. And they are not all faith schools or academies either.

It matters on the area. Our local area has a mixed, comp state school with 90% A-C with 40% A & A. The worst in the area has 70%. However in our neighbouring area the best state school is 68% A*-C.... it can be a real mix

The crucial thing is to look at the progress made by low, middle and high attainers. And in my opinion, the crucial one is the low attainers. It's easy for a school to make good progress with the high attainers- what it does with the lower sets says more about the school than anything else.

A comp may have a skewed cohort depending if higher ability local children go to Grammers. Take a look at the exam statistics breakdown for the school between low middle and high ability and then think which section your child falls in.

I have had a quick look at the stats for my son's school which is one of the consistently highly oversubscribed comps in our city. Its statistic for 5 GCSEs A*-C including English and maths was 75% in 2011, but in the sixties for the three years prior to that (60% in 2009). Don't know whether that level of fluctuation is normal. We are in an area of genuine comps in the sense of no state grammars in our local authority's area and few going private (-as far as I know, no pupil in my son's year at primary went on to a private school).

I don't think you can know how 'good' a school is from it's exam stats. You have no idea whether those stats represent mediocre resutls ofrm an extremely high ability cohort, or a great result from an, on average, low ability cohort.

Neither do exam stats tell you how well a school will educate a high ability child, a medium ability child etc.

I would look on the more detailed info and stats for each school on the Dept of Ed website. Does each ability group make expected progress? How many A* results? How well is the school performiong against the demographic profile of the iintake, etc etc.

I would consider 65% good for a comp anywhere.

I think about 24% of all GCSE entries were A/A* this year. As Lancelottie says, they're not evenly distributed - most may go to the bright children taking lots of single science subjects and generally more exams than anyone else, or an extra foreign language GCSE for a language spoken at home, etc.

It depends so much on your area. Where we live there isn't a state school within a 20 mile radius (at least) that has got over 65% in the last 10 years!

3540% would indeed be impressive. 35 to 40% was what I thought I'd typed.

Yes; and our son's school had some who did well in English but missed the C in maths, and vice versa.

The school is not going to send your child away with 70% of his GCSEs just because that's their average score. S/He could get all A, or fail the lot. Our prospective school gets around 3540% of all passes at A or A, which suggests to me that the teaching is there for the child who is able to benefit from it.

The national averages for 2012 including all types of state school are about 59% for 5 A-C inc Eng and Maths and 18% Ebacc. Highest regional averages are in London (about 61% and 21%).

So anything above that would be good, really, and you can make allowances for intake (included in the league tables - average 'high attainers' is about 33% = primary pupils getting Level 5 in both Eng & Maths). So a cohort with less than 33% high attainers getting 60% on the GCSEs measure or above average Ebacc is doing well. Mind you, a low measure of high attainers might be masked by the number of highly achieving maths/science geniuses for whom English was a second language, so intake statistics have their flaws.