This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The government’s new performance measure has upended the traditional pecking order of England’s secondary schools, knocking grammar schools out of the top spots and boosting schools that dramatically improved results among their pupils.

The Department for Education’s latest performance tables, published on Thursday — including 2016’s GCSE exams and ranked by its new Progress 8 measure — reveals that the best schools in England are those which make the greatest advances in their pupils’ grades.

At the top of the national Progress 8 league table sit two faith schools in Blackburn run by the Tauheedul multi-academy trust, one of which, Tauheedul Islamic Boys’ high school, is a free school with its first full cohort sitting GCSEs.

The new measure of progress is calculated using a pupil’s best eight exam scores — with extra emphasis on maths and English — and then comparing the final results with a pupil’s expected scores based on previous performance.

Those schools that recorded positive progress scores among their pupils outperformed the national average, while those that returned a negative score did worse.

Among all schools with more than 50 pupils taking exams, both Tauheedul schools, along with Harris Academy in Battersea, King Solomon’s Academy in Paddington, St Andrew’s Catholic school in Leatherhead and the City Academy, Hackney, recorded progress scores of more than one, a complete grade above their expected results.

Progress 8 and GCSEs: will the new way to judge schools be fairer? Read more

The best-performing selective school appeared further down, in 13th place on the national performance table, with Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar school recording a Progress 8 score of 0.82.

Hamid Patel, chief executive of Tauheedul Education Trust, said he was delighted by the progress figures.

“It is especially rewarding to see that some of our most vulnerable learners – those who join us from primary school behind the expected level of attainment and those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds – have achieved such outstanding results,” Hamid said.

“We are focused on building on this success across our family of schools and through collaboration with others, to ensure every young person has the opportunity to fulfil their potential.”

In previous performance tables the key metric was the percentage of pupils achieving grade C or higher in five GCSE subjects, including English and maths. That led to schools concentrating efforts into raising pupil performance only to a C, to the detriment of other results.

The new measure, however, rewards schools which do better than expected, including raising a pupil’s grade from an E to a D, or from a B to an A.

Nick Gibb, the school standards minister, hailed the latest figures as evidence of higher standards and praised teachers and pupils for their efforts.

“As well as confirming that the number of young people taking GCSEs in core academic subjects is rising, today’s figures show the attainment gap between disadvantaged and all other pupils has now narrowed by 7% since 2011,” Gibb noted.

“Under our reforms there are almost 1.8 million more young people in good or outstanding schools than in 2010, and through our new, fairer Progress 8 measure we will ensure that even more children are supported to achieve their full potential.”

But Kevin Courtney, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, responded: “Ministers claim that the Progress 8 numbers show that educational quality is rising. That is far from the truth.

“Secondary schools suffer from a narrowed curriculum, from increasingly severe problems of teacher retention and an impending crisis of funding. It is to these issues that ministers should turn their attention.”

The DfE figures also showed improvement under the previous measure of attainment, with state schools seeing 63% of pupils gaining five A*-C grades, including English and maths, compared with 59% in 2015. The new Attainment 8 measure - which calculates results in each pupil’s best eight subjects - showed an improvement of 1.5 points to 49.9 in 2016.

The new measure also caused fewer schools to fall below the Department for Education’s floor standard, making them vulnerable to intervention. Last year 329 schools – 11% of the total in England – failed to reach the floor target but under Progress 8 only 282 failed to do so.

However, recent legislation creating a new class of “coasting” schools, which receive scrutiny from the DfE’s regional agents, means that 329 will be branded as coasting, of which 152 are also below the floor standard.

The DfE was quick to point out that disadvantaged pupils improved at a faster rate in grammar and selective schools, compared with those in other state schools.

GCSE league tables show schools struggling to adjust to changes Read more

The average Progress 8 score for the small number of disadvantaged pupils in grammar schools was a positive 0.13, compared with -0.32 for those across all state mainstream schools in England.

However, the figures also showed wide variation. Tunbridge Wells Girls’ Grammar school, the best performing selective school under Progress 8, had so few disadvantaged pupils enrolled that the DfE did not publish their results.

In more than 6% of schools, disadvantaged pupils – including those on free school meals or formerly in care – made faster progress than their peers in the same school.

In the national A-level league tables, also published on Thursday, independent schools once again dominated. The high-flying St Paul’s Girls’ school achieved an average grade of just below A* in the three best grades for each of its pupils.

Not far behind were the north London selective state schools – Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet, and Henrietta Barnett School, Hampstead – where pupils scored better than an A on average in each of their best three subjects.

A new sixth form free school, King’s College London Maths School, saw each of its 65 pupils earn an average of an A grade in three subjects.

The highest performing comprehensive was Durham Johnston community school in Durham, boasting a B+ average, a similar result to Hills Road sixth form college in Cambridge.

In the local authority performance tables, Reading made an appearance at the top of the table, ahead of the London boroughs of Sutton and Kingston upon Thames, followed by Trafford.