GCSE rate at dd's school has dropped from 65% to 41% over 4 years.

For me ebacc is definitely a secondary measure. I would be a lot more interested in the 5 GCSEs A*-C incl English & Maths.

The particular thing which would concern me as has concerned the OP is a sudden change. IMO such a decline sould be being explained by the school.

Should but in my experience such is the arrogance of even the most incompetent Head that they wont.

I don't understand why RE doesn't out as an Ebacc subject?

Yes, DDs school is the same. RE (philosophy & Ethics) is compulsory, so EBacc is low.

My dd's school has woeful figure for the Ebacc- but that is because it has an amazing RE curriculum, and lots of the kids, particularly the scientists, choose it as their humanities subject. And therefore don't get the EBacc. But if you just glanced at the stats it would look concerning,

A school's results can be caused to plummet by a technicality eg putting students into IGCSEs instead of GCSEs - top academic schools have been caught by this.

My DCs' plummet to the bottom of the league tables was caused by a monumental cock-up - the school had royally screwed up students' entrance into English GCSE so that students had to resit the following year and didnt get to sit the Lit element. The English GCSE the students were left with wasnt good enough for league tables.

The Head made some whiney-arsed excuses about this being terribly unfair. Funny, no other school managed to do something so pathetically stupid.

No explanation or apology was ever given to students.

You know the real disgrace? The head kept his job.

I thought that high attainers were the ones who scored level 5 and above in year 6 SATs, middle attainers level 4 and low attainers less than 4? Could be wrong though.

It is perfectly possible for a school to have a lower attaining year group though. A school will know if it has a weaker cohort or a stronger one. If a school is thought to be good and supported by parents it is probable that it had a weaker cohort. Not even all the grammar schools around me get 100% A-C grades every year!

My dc's school also from 72% went down to 55%. That s very unusual as historically the school always has around 70%. Many locals always commends on how good and popular the school is with parents and children. Don't know what went wrong.

It is strict but in a good way - DD1 would have been kicked out of any other school in the area but they really fought to get her through and her head of year was quite sad when she left.

DD1 was entered for all of her GCSE exams even those she was quite weak at, I haven't heard of anyone having to pay privately to enter. They don't fiddle their figures, what they do is put intensive support in to those children who might not achieve maths and english from very experienced teachers. They were resitting at every exam session until they got a C but that has happened at every school. I think they will use past papers as mock exams from now on until they think the kids can get a C before entering them in the exams.

I'd take your daughter to visit, it is a brilliant school and there are very few disruptions to learning because of the rules.

I looked at the results for all the schools in the city yesterday and was amazed. I couldn't believe the difference and I had expected WF to be much higher and your DD's school and LC to be up there too.

Dd1 went to the school on the hill and I know why it got such good results, it puts so much time and effort into the kids that are struggling to get a c in English and maths. So much so that last year there was one child who didn't get a c in maths and English. It will be interesting how they manage the removal of multiple attempts at the exams though.

I used to live in Dover. An 'interesting' town.

The Grammar schools in Folkestone and Dover have 34% of the roll as middle ability kids . This is obviously a very high percentage for Grammar schools , but Grammar schools very wildly in their in take from area to area.

definition of low middle and high is the same for all schools as its ON the DfE site ....
here's a comp to look at
www.education.gov.uk/cgi-bin/schools/performance/school.pl?urn=136643&superview=sec&qtype=LA

At my ds's secondary modern school, high achievers are those that come in on 4a or 5. At my dd's grammar school, middle achievers are those that come in on 4a- I would be very surprised if there are any on lower levels than that. Not sure what happens in comprehensive schools.

Curlew. It says A+ not A. There are pluses and minuses used in the grades. Is is where the results are mostly A or above and the B's are outweighed by the As? Therefore there are more A*s than B's. This would be quite possible. Clutching are straws here! The grammars are not highly selective here. They take 30%. I was surprised they had any pupils in the mid range. They did. About 8%.

Something we learned: you cant change the school. However, it is possible that you will be able to improve the experience for your DD. You really do need to be one of 'those' parents. Do go to parents evenings armed with questions. Dont listen to the platitudes (credit to the class, blah, blah, bollocks). Challenge back. Fix them with a beady eye and look for answers about lack of progress.

We were slow to realise there were major problems. Things reached absolute rock bottom in DD1's first year of GCSE:

• English: teacher took examinable coursework home then left suddenly. The coursework wasnt returned and its absence was only discovered close to the end of the year.

• History: teacher wouldnt teach to syllabus, no useful work done for the entire year

• German: teacher mor interested in marking her PSHE homework. Would tell DD1 what the lesson was and leave her to tell everyone else.

• Sciences: teacher off on long term sick filled in with non-subject supply teachers. No useful work done in the year

Despite how crap my DD's school was at the time (right at the bottom of the league tables) DD did leave with good GCSEs. Teachers in the second year pulled out all the stops to get the 2 year syllabus covered in a single year. I have nothing but praise for the teachers in the second year of GCSE.

Low/Medium/High ability is a very broad brush classification. A highly selective grammar will have a disproportionately high number of pupils in the top 10/5/1% groups and thus their High Ability group will probably do better than the HA cohort of a truly comprehensive school, or even a less selective "anyone in the top 25% is in" grammar. That also explains how some grammars (not all) get very good VA scores - they're simply selecting at a finer level than the KS2 SATS can detect, and those distinctions become discernible within the wider spread of GCSE results.

national

Is "higher achiever" relative to the cohort within the school or relative to national averages?

If the average is a then they must all get a for everything-are you sure that's right?

THe average grade thing is the new bit,
on the news they said its the average of 8 subjects including English and Maths.
Grammar schools by nature of the 11+ will have more kids who will get top whack in both English and Maths and other classic Ebacc subjects
Comps are likely to have kids who have less 'balanced' academic abilities
eg rubbish at maths but great at art
I suspect the data needs some serious mining though ...

But many of the grammars are higher than 1000, even in Kent. We also know some of their grammars are coasting.

What I find difficult to understand is the attainment of the mid and high achievers in different schools. I have looked at my local secondary modern, a local girls' grammar and a comprehensive I know well. The high achievers at the local secondary get an average of 324.9 GCSE points per student, the grammar 437.8 and the comprehensive 360. The average GCSE grade for the high achievers is B, A+ and B- respectively. Obviously the grammar has many more high achievers and the secondary has more than the comprehensive but the higher achievers in the comprehensive do less well in their grades than the secondary modern. This is mirrored across all abilities, so the mid and lower in the comprehensive all get lower average grades than my local sec. cohort. Can anyone explain why high achievers at a grammar school get A+ as an average grade but the comprehensive high achievers only get an average of a B-? What, exactly, the, does high achiever mean? Very confused.

Just to give you more ammunition, my ds is in year 8 at a secondary modern- he was a 5b in English at the end of year 6, and is currently working at 6a.

Make an appointment with her form tutor. Say in advance that you want to talk about her progress and say in which subjects, so that he can't put you off by saying he'll need to talk to th subject teachers.