Secondary choice panic after seeing results

[Whyisitsohardtofindausername]

We have struggled between 2 secondary schools as to which goes first and which second for a couple of months and finally thought we had come to a decision. This week the results were released and it’s made me completely rethink what has taken us so long to decide.
There’s still time for us to change the choices but really need some unbiased/ external input/opinions on this please.

School A (Proposed 1st preference)
New academy. Due to covid this is it’s first results (became the new academy in the 19/20 school year). History of very very bad management. Was on the list of 100 worst schools in the county. Made headlines for all the wrong reasons (management related). Ended up with no management/trust and the new trust have taken over and really turned it around. Buildings were condemned but now has new buildings. It was a ‘not over my dead body school’ just 5 years ago but the improvements are phenomenal. The curriculum is fresh, forward thinking and I really like it. At GCSE they encourage EBacc but it isn’t enforced (big win!). The teachers are inspirational, some taught in the ‘old’ school and pushed for the changes they have now so are definitely dedicated. The head has vision. The trust is really good. The school values match with ours. Good range of extra curricular, good learning support and pastoral care. People have really high opinions of the place. When we went to look during the school day, I liked what I saw and the happy atmosphere and good pupil teacher interactions.
20 minutes walk/bus (40 minute walk)
Headline figures
Progress: -0.72
English and maths 5+: 28%
Attainment 8: 38.5
No ofsted.

School B (Proposed 2nd preference)
School with a proven history, been an academy for 10 years, and before that it was an outstanding/excellent school. It’s definitely one of the best schools in the area. They have a good curriculum, triple science is an actual option but EBacc is compulsory (unless they won’t achieve a 4+ in one of the areas). Learning support seems to be very good. They have a lot of extra curricular options, lots of spots and outdoors things eg John muir award, DofE, additional GCSEs in after school clubs for those who want to choose them. Teachers are dedicated and sent their own children there (says a lot). Lots of parents love this schools and sing it’s praises. I liked the feeling and atmosphere when we went to look around (during the school day), how happy everyone was, as well as how the teachers and pupils interacted.
45/50 minutes walk/bus (not in walking distance)
Headline figures
Progress: 0.33
English and maths 5+: 69%
Attainment 8: 57.9
Ofsted (from 2014) ‘outstanding’ but too old to bother with so we only skimmed it

The decision was extremely difficult but mainly went for A because it was closer, it’s making rapid improvements and without ofsted and results to look at there wasn’t a lot of different between what we were seeing.

For reference, our 3rd Preference
40/45 minutes walk/bus (not in walking distance)
Headline figures
Progress: 0.42
English and maths 5+: 64%
Attainment 8: 56.4
Ofsted (2018) ‘good’

Another schools in the same trust as school A (who have had appalling backgrounds but for different reasons and are now totally different schools) got the following headline results. Wondering whether this is a good indicator for how school A might be in a few years?

They’ve had this school approx 5 years
Headline figures
Progress: -0.18
English and maths 5+: 42%
Attainment 8: 43.4
Ofsted (2022) ‘good’

They’ve has this school approx 8 years
Headline figures
Progress: -0.08
English and maths 5+: 48%
Attainment 8: 52.9
Ofsted (2019) ‘good’

Im also aware that I’m maybe overthinking this, and after the last few years, putting results into context, it may be just there’s too many external factors in play with school A.

I'd suggest you drill down into the detail behind those results - at least into low/medium/high achievers. Very hard to understand them without context (a school with more high achievers is very likely to get better results, for example).

As it's school that's recently been turned around, it might also be too early to see the results turning round. Particularly with the complexities of Covid thrown in!

On the basis of what you've said, I wouldn't let the results alone change my opinion. If you are able to talk to the school I would ask about their results and what they are doing to improve them.

On the face of it, its too early to see the results of the new management. These are children who spent more time under the old regime.

Do you know any parents of Yr7 or Yr8 children you could get an unbiased view from?

Stick with what you want. You clearly
chose it for a reason. If it’s what you want. Go for it.
Your school A is too new plus covid. It’s been said above, I second it.

What's your child like? Sporty, academic, arty? How much of a problem is doing EBACC going to be? Do they care where their friends are going?

Both choice 2 and 3 have excellent results compared to national averages. Choice 1 seems like a riskier option.

Will there be other kids from your area making the journey to choice 2?

40 mins bus/walk isn't that bad if they're travelling with friends.

Primary will send to all our preferences.

B and C have a higher concentration of higher attainers.

C partly due to the area it’s in. B I recon because in the last few years parents have opted away from A due to all the palaver.
Those who can afford the transport have gone to B or C to avoid A.

With A the higher achievers are getting the
same results that would be in the middle attainers columns for B and C. Again, I’m thinking this will change with more people who would have opted for B and C in the past few years opting for A. Also thinking, with A, as a few of you have said, the improved direction of the school and new curriculum this years cohort won’t have had the benefit of.

I don’t know how I feel about EBacc. In one way I can see the sense of it, in another I think it’s ridiculous and too restrictive. School A still allows all the EBacc subjects to be taken if a child wants to, if they don’t they have 3 free options. B has very little choice. It’s only one free option.

I’ve spoken to parents and kids at both and they all like their respective schools. No real concerns.

There's very little data from school A, and arguably what there is is worse than useless. Students who took their GCSEs last summer would have been in the old school in Y7 and Y8 and affected by COVID in Y9 and Y10. Their experience, and hopefully their results, are not going to reflect your child's at all.

It's a bit of a leap of faith and no one would blame you for going with the safer option of B, which also sounds very positive.

The one thing I would not suggest is picking B now just because it'll be easier to move to A if things go pear shaped. Aim to get it right first time, your child deserves nothing less.

How does B manage only to offer 1 option? 2 English, maths, 2 sci, MFL, hist/geog makes 7. Do they only allow 8, insist on RE or PE, or something else?

We have found in practice the rules are a bit more flexible than they headline, but I can see the attraction of a school that is unashamedly more flexible to student needs and preferences.

B as first choice, A as second.

B's likely to be oversubscribed and A under, so if it turns out to be the wrong fit, you are unlikely to have any issues getting a place at B afterwards.

Not a hooe on this planet would I take a risk with A. Ultimately they’re at just over 1/4 of their kids getting the minimum number of gcse passes. Whilst likely to improve the track record of the other school is less than half.

i couldn’t and wouldn’t accept that risk I’m afraid when there’s a school with significantly better results available to you.

It's 28% English and Maths at 5+; OP doesn't say what the proportion is getting minimum number of GCSE passes - but it's likely to be higher than that!

But you need English and maths. So I would not be happy with only 28% managing to get that. It’s not good enough, it’s a barrier to so many other courses to not have the 5 in maths.

These broken down results might shed a bit of light on what’s really going on.

I don’t know how you work out or find the new equivalent of ‘5+ GCSEs A*-C’ but the results for English and maths at 4+ are certainly higher (T is all the Y11, LMH are low middle and high)

School A: T51% L18% M60% H94%
School B: T88% L60% M96% H99%
School C: T80% L32% M86% H98%

Same for 5+
School A: T28% L3% M33% H65%
School B: T68% L24% M69% H93%
School C: T64% L11% M65% H92%

Im not entirely sure where my DC is or how to figure that out. I would say probably middle?

@Finerthings
A offers 8 GCSEs. 5 compulsory and 3 options. 9 GCSEs if they are chosen for triple science (usually top set).

B offers 8 GCSEs. 7 compulsory (EBacc) and 1 option. 9 GCSEs if they choose to do one in after school sessions (which are limited to the list on offer in these sessions).

Yes, before it’s said. All the schools here do 8 GCSEs as standard. I don’t know why, they just do.

Looking at everything I’ve said I’m back to being confused.
I can see B is the better school for results, which I can see coming down at some point if parents start to choose A. But it’s so restrictive with curriculum. A is clearly worse but has a much better flexible curriculum.
B is quite a journey away. A is only 20 minutes.
B is a dedicated school bus so problems with after school activities. A is public transport.
A is improving and improving fast. B has always been good.
I want to make the right choice but it’s so hard, especially as without seeing the results I couldn’t see a massive difference in the schools other than past reputation which we chose to ignore as, especially in school A, it’s irrelevant now.

Surely this would depend on prior attainment though?
If the school is weighted towards low prior attainment this would skew the results. OP needs to look into the breakdown

Looks like I cross posted with the OP.

B certainly the better school for results. I do think your school A is being skewed by low prior attainers. Still low results for the middle and high compared to B and C. Although. Doesn’t meant they won’t improve. You need to lo at the context of the schools. You’ve already mentioned the backgrounds and covid. These will certainly have had an impact.
How do the results for the middle and high attainers compare to the national averages? (Sorry, I don’t know what the national averages are this year)
Again, allowing for some contextual variation. Maybe around 5% either way wouldn’t be too bad in my opinion.
Its half term so potentially difficult, but if you could speak to the school it would be good to discuss the results and their action plans for improvement in the future.
If all fails, go with your gut feeling.

I'd agree to speak to the school.

the 4+ results for School A look encouraging to me, whilst reflecting that it looks like the profile of School B is that it has significantly more higher achievers than average - which in part explains why its results are better than average.

And of course, people should always bear in mind that simply because a school gets better than average results does not mean that your DC will get better than average results. Other factors (including the very positive ones OP has outlined) come into play.

I wouldn't focus on GCSE options right now- a lot can change in those terms in 3 years, when your DD would pick. There is a push from Ofsted against restrictive curriculums, right now, and I think we will see a lot of schools changing from this in the next few years. It's also hard to recruit some teachers (e.g. MFL) so again, schools may stop e.g. enforcing a language option. Equally, the other school may go the other way, and cut certain subjects, e.g. due to funding.

For me, those progress results and English and Maths results from school A are very low. And yes, there will be reasons for this- and the last couple of years have in general not been good.

But, you say the new trust have "turned the school around". Clearly, from the data, they haven't (yet). They have made the school appear shinier on the outside, possibly improved behaviour at least on a surface level. But it sounds like they have yet to improve teaching and learning in a meaningful way.

I'm a teacher who has been through academisation in two schools, and I can tell you what may happen next- it's very likely that individual staff will be blamed for poor results, and will end up leaving (regardless of how dedicated to the school they are). The school will then realise it's difficult to recruit in certain subjects, and become more reliant on supply etc. And teaching and learning will actually get worse because there won't be reliable teaching etc.

Effectively, for a current Y11 student, one going to school B would perform a whole grade better than one going to school A.

People on mumsnet will tell you a bright child will do well anywhere, but a school where <30% are getting 5s, the focus will not be on the children aiming for grades 7+. It's possible, in some subjects, the very top of the curriculum won't be taught, or will only be rushed through, and these are the things that are hardest to self teach.

Equally, if you are bright, but not very bright, then being in a class of other able students will often pull you up. Being with less able ones will drag you down.

I'd go for school B.

If, when your DD gets to choosing her options, School A's results have significantly improved, and the school offers much better choice, then you could consider moving her. But I'd want to see a few more years of results, to get the sense of whether this year's results are just a blip, or whether actually there haven't been meaningful changes at the school in terms of outcomes.

I couldn’t agree more. If your aspirations for your child are that she at least has the option to be taught to levels 7-9 if that reflects her ability why on earth would you take the gamble on a school which at current levels doesn’t appear to. Personally I want a school where children are taught absolutely to their potential and where doing their best is the norm whether that’s a 3 or a 9.

Yes. I can't see any evidence from the OP's post that the school is actually improving rapidly, and I know some academies are very good at marketing themselves and not much else.

If <30% of children are getting 5s, that may mean only 1-2 sets being targeted for higher papers in maths/science etc, and they may be a wide range of ability, which I know from experience in science means you don't spend lots of time on some of the harder parts of the "higher only" content. And if you could spend more time on it, more students would grasp that content (often students can understand e.g. more complex moles calculations, percentage yield etc if they do enough repetition). But you have to go through the content more slowly, so that time isn't available.

I've just posted something v similar actually so it's interesting to hear your responses. I got freaked out recently when I saw how high the A level requirements are for RG unis. I worry if they don't get the depth at GCSE because the class isn't taught at a high level, then they won't have the foundation for A levels.

I just don't think I'd risk A, sorry. It's results are really quite poor, I'd worry about the ethos. Are the other students likely to be serious about their studies, or will their motivation be low? Maybe your son will find friends who are the good students, but maybe he won't. I think it's so so important who your friends are when you're a teenager, it influences a lot.

@Whyisitsohardtofindausername if the kids who got those results at school A joined the school when it was an "over my dead body" school then they are likely to have a more challenging profile than the kids who will join the school in 2023. If it was undersubscribed, a significant proportion of them may have transferred to the school after being excluded or displaced from other schools. Some of them might have even joined in year 10 or 11. Many of them may have had little or no support at home during the lockdown. So you do need to be cautious with the comparison to school B.

Agree with some other posters, school As results are pretty awful. A progress score of -0.72 must still put them right near the bottom nationally of secondary schools ( maybe bottom 500 this time). Just to remind the progress score basically compares how the kids at that school would have performed if they had been somewhere else, so on average at school A they gained 3/4 grade lower in their GCSEs than at any other school, then as another poster mentioned when compared to school B, on average the kids at A did a grade worse. That is a massive difference.
In additon the very low numbers of 5+ at maths and English definitely mean that teaching will be geared towards the bottom, with most kids entered for FT in tiered subjects, and towards the low to medium range questions in the others.
As a comparison I teach at an ordinary state comp and 77% of our kids got 5+ in Eng and Maths.

@Postapocalypticcowgirl Oh they have turned this school around. Trust me on that one. Pre new academy I remember seeing a progress 8 of -5.something and GCSE pass rate of <5%. It’s a shame they seem to have removed the pre covid results from the collars schools website as would have been nice to see. It was a dreadful place. Teachers on strike demanding the old trust take some interest, MPs involved, special measures twice in a row, kids leaving school with no qualifications whatsoever, even the high ability ones. Put it this way, even the kids went on strike at how bad it was. It has some of the same pupils but it’s not the same school.

The year group who own these results, I have found out there are <100 kids, with approximately 60% of them low ability and >40% of the school on FSM. I think as a few of you have said, and thank you for highlighting it, it’s a bit worrying that teaching to to bottom rather than the top might be happening for a couple of years. A few did get 7/8/9s so it’s not all bad news.

Anyways, there’s some very valid points been made towards both schools here. I have taken them all on board and will certainly have a really good think about what you are all saying.

I think it’s interesting most of you would go for B and the reasons for it. Thanks for sharing those.

I’ve spoken to DC again about all of the schools. We’ve had a look at all the websites and prospectuses again this afternoon. Thought about what they want/don’t want from school. I’ve added my opinions in as well.

After thinking about all the points made on this thread very carefully, the context of the schools and our conversations. I’m leaning heavily towards B.

Now we’ve seen the results and hearing the point made about what progress 8 is really telling/showing is, school A is risky. However, I would like to see if I can speak to school A this coming week about their results and future plans as a part of me still really likes the direction this school is going in.

I did consider after reading all this to bump school C up to 2nd, DC didn’t like school C (didn’t at the open evening and still not keen) so that’s a firm 3rd. DC doesn’t want it named at all but I’m being the parent and putting my foot down as I don’t like the alternative due to reasons beyond results (behaviour, bullying, low level disruption, teachers who don’t recommend it kind of reasons).

*Compare school website, not collars