Anyone else horrified by the Secondary School they've been allocated?

[alsoaperson]

DD1 has been given a (state) Secondary that's hitting 50% 5 A-C in a nice, middle class area (i.e. coasting). I don't think they push the kids and teaching is patchy. The more I hear about it, the more horrified I am.
There are no better schools I can appeal to.
I'm considering moving house, going to Church and trying to get the other two into a feeder school for the excellent local(ish) faith school. But it's going to mean a lot of upset including moving schools for all three - assuming I can get DD into the faith school in Y9. (& yes, there were good reasons I couldn't do this earlier, unfortunately).
I am a private tutor, English teacher and part time pushy parent. I have some free time to help them (& can do most subjects), but not so much because I need to pay the bills.
Anyone else had this? What did you do?

Thanks, adeucalione

I'm going to weigh up the opinions on here. It's so true we don't always see things in time. Life can get complicated at just the wrong moment! I'm going to look into the faith school option more. At the very least, I could try to get DD into their sixth form and see if I can sneak the other two in for Y7.

Just realised I'm using the wrong DD/DS!! S stands for son, presumably! What does D stand for? 'dear'? 'darling?'
(I'm new here in case you can't tell!!)

OP, have you seen a breakdown of the results of the school you have been allocated - rather than just the headline figure of 50% 5 A-C. If you have, you may find that amongst those 50%, there are a fair few that have got excellent grades. And, in 5 years time, your DC could be one of the pupils who have similar achievements. Also, if you take a look at the 2011 and 2012 GCSE tables, pupils achievement is mapped against their level at entry to the school. If your DD is already a high achieving pupils, you can see how similar pupils do.

However good a school might be, the pupils have to have the ability and put in the effort themselves to achieve well. Encouragement from home will be one of the key factors influencing their motivation.

Yes the DfE tables are excellent for showig the % of low, middle and high achievers at the school, and then showing how each group progress.

In our town there are 2 schools opposite each other, one has approx 50% A-C pass rate, the other has 90%. The first sends 2-3 students to Oxbridge every year, the second hasn't had any Oxbridge students for the last 3 years.

There re lots more stats you can pul out, but if you have a reasonably bright, hard working DS then he would do equally well at either if these schools.

How do you define high, average and low achiever? Is it level 5 at end of year 6 - high achiever, level 4 - average and level 3 - low achiever?

Yes, that's right, the snootyfox.

Good question. The info is probably buried in the tables somewhere.

Thanks

So so helpful CecilyP and NewFerry ! Thanks! I'm going to go straight away and look this up.