How much weight to put on exam results?

[loveisagirlnameddaisy]

DD13 is at a private secondary in Herts, we're now looking for DS10. He's had three offers, including DD school. When we applied, all three schools had similar exam results.

Was reviewing these schools again yesterday before making a final decision and noticed that DD's school exam results for 2022 were considerably down on previous two years (which were teacher assessed grades). The other two have maintained similar levels.

DS is favouring this school and it is logistically easier in terms of travel time and co-curricula built into school day, not as after school clubs.
However, seeing the poorer exam results has really thrown me. How much should this factor in to our decision?

It's worth adding that DD appears to be doing very well, has been identified as a 'high achiever', top 15% in her year, but she's always been bright so not sure how much of this is due to this specific school per se and she's only been there just over a year.

I wouldn't worry about 1 year dipping - there may be many factors impacting on that cohirt including them getting a particularly tricky deal due to covid - potentially missing the years where core knowledge is built and also not having the chance to reheqrse exams and technique as much, not having so many recent past papers to access etc.

There may have also been issues for that particulsr cohort such as sen, poor behaviour etc. At a private school, just a couoke of wobbling children could have really skewed results

Ideally compare 2022 against 2019.

Some schools 'played the system' more than others in the years of teacher assessed grades.

Also if these are selective schools, don't grades more reflect the quality of child coming in than anything else?

I think that will be a common trend. How do they compare with pre Covid year groups?

Just looked back to 2019 and 2018 and they are similar to 2022. So perhaps this is the true academic level of the school?

Cant see historic results for the other two, they only appear to publish the most recent set for 2022.

Compare from 2019 and earlier. 2020 and later years are not true reflections due to centre assessed grades and teacher assessed grades. This is why exam boards are making grade boundaries harder year on year until they reflect 2019 levels.

What are the exam results?