Picking secondary school - gcse results?

[MadameLeBean]

I'm probably able to get my dd into local state secondary which is ofsted "outstanding" and most popular school in area but their gcse results were:

Students gaining five A*-C grades - 87%
Students gaining five A*C grades in Maths and English - 75%

This not much better than most other schools in the borough.

The school I went to (okay it was grammar) got 100% 5 A-C including maths and English. In fact 81% of all GCSE results were at grade A or A. 15% of pupils got 10 or more A* grades.

I know I am being PFB but I'm concerned : 25% of pupils not getting above a D in English and maths is a lot!

Wwyd? Private is an option but I'm not wealthy enough that it wouldn't have a big impact on our ability to do other things eg family holidays, have a baby (would need ft childcare), etc. So if I'm not going private we need to move out of London to grammar area???!

I see others have already mentioned it, but you need to look at the value added stats. I'm looking at two secondaries for DS1, based on GCSE results there isn't much to choose between them. However when you look at the value added one has a positive figure and the other has a negative one, which is what has swayed my decision.

Ds is in yr 10 at a boys secondary where 5 years ago the gcse results were 35%.People thought we were mad to send him and openly sneered.

Last year they were 75%.
Next year they will be higher.

He is forecast A*s and As.

"Where we live now is all comprehensive and initially I thought well 70% a-c is rubbish etc, but then you realise that it includes all the lower ability kids that frankly never came under our radar growing up as we were all with the top 10-20% or whatever it was"

And there you have it. The iniquity of a selective education system summed up in one short paragraph!