19% GCSE passmark?

[BluePenguin]

Would you allow your child to attend a school with a 19% GCSE passmark and if this school was the only school your child had been offered a place at...and you couldn't move house...what would you do?

ST - I'm just asking how you make your decision. Not querying your ability to do anything at all. Genuinely curious and intrigued.

Although the overall % pass rate is a useful rough guide, I'd look at the GCSE A & A* rates across all subjects, plus the candidate numbers, which are often published as an insert in the school brochure. As long as some of the pupils are attaining those grades then I'd be reassured.

Also, as I'm sure you realise, be alert to the fact statistics can be manipulated in terms of what exams pupils are entered for or not entered for. One school local to my father, used to claim an 85% pass rate at GCSE (before they had to add the English and Maths) because the pupils all were entered for an ICT course worth about 4 GCSEs.

cat64 i agree with your generalisation - but this particular school doesn't even have a good track record for people with learning difficulties. It seems to fail everyone...except for a handful of well-motivated children who would probably be ok, wherever they went IYKWIM.
Plus it has a really high truancy rate. DS hates school so much that if he realises whole rafts of children are not attending, neither will he, I suspect! It is so hard to know what to do for the best.

A high truancy rate would definitely put me off a school. My son sounds a little like yours - the teachers at primary school thought he was easily led and distracted by others, and I totally agree. Ds1's head teacher even took me aside when we were considering secondary options and strongly hinted that ds1 needed to be at 'good' school in order to keep focussed - the subtext of this conversation was definitely to go for private education or grammar school (and this was from a head teacher of a state school).