York Schools achieving best ever results
12 January 2011
EDUCATION chiefs in York are celebrating the success of last year’s GCSE pupils after their achievements with the GCSE league tables
The tables show that many York schools achieved their best-ever results and are well above national averages, with 81 per cent of young people in York achieving five or more A* to C grades, an improvement of nearly eight percentage points compared to 2009.
The percentage of pupils gaining five or more A* to C grades, including English and Maths GCSE, is 59 per cent, maintaining last year’s significant improvement and remaining higher than the national average of 53.4 per cent.
This year also sees the introduction of the new English Baccalaureate award, recognising pupils who achieve good GCSE grades in English, maths, two sciences, an ancient or modern language, and geography or history.
Again, York performed higher than the national average, with 20 per cent of pupils achieving the award compared with 16 per cent nationally.
But the government’s introduction of this measure has caused some controversy.
Huntington School, head teacher, John Tomsett said: “The vocationally-based curriculum which we have developed in York over the past few years which has enabled hundreds of students to attain qualifications that have allowed them to progress into further and higher education, employment and training is not acknowledged by the new English Baccalaureate. That is a great shame.
“Even though Huntington School's English Baccalaureate figure is significantly above the national average, I find it difficult to understand the logic of introducing the new measure only seven weeks ago.
“These results are from August 2010 and students began studying for these qualifications in September 2008. It is the most extreme case of "moving the goalposts" I have ever encountered.”
Post-16 Achievement and Attainment tables have also been released today and the results show that York is making continuous and sustained improvement and performing very well in relation to national averages. York’s result for the indicator – ‘percentage of candidates achieving two or more passes of A Level equivalent size’ is 96.1 per cent, which is well above the national result.
Pete Dwyer, Director of Adults, Children and Education, City of York Council said, “I am delighted with our GCSE and post-16 results and to see so many schools improving on last year’s performance. I would like to congratulate all young people and schools on their achievement this year. These are our best ever results overall and are a real tribute to the hard work and dedication of teachers, pupils, staff and parents.”
Executive Member for Children and Young People’s Services, Coun Carol Runciman said: “The young people who achieved these results should be exceptionally proud of their achievements. It takes a great deal of hard work to get such fantastic results.”
At York High School in Acomb the tables show that the proportion of pupils gaining 5 good GCSE grades including English and Maths has improved from 35 to 57 per cent in two years and the proportion of pupils gaining 5 grade A –C GCSE grades has increased from 53 per cent to 92 per cent in the same period.
Head teacher David Ellis said “Everyone is very proud indeed of the achievements of our Year 11 pupils last summer and they deserve our congratulations. Improvements like these in a school’s performance are also however a results of a tremendous amount of hard work and commitment by the staff who work in the school too. In three years the examination results achieved by young people in our community have been transformed and the impact this will have on the life chances of our students are the most important implication of this.”
York High opened in September 2007 following the merger of Lowfield and Oaklands School. Following a major fire in October 2008 the school moved to the new building on Cornlands Road in January 2009. The new school was judged to be a good school by Ofsted in June 2009 and the 2010 GCSE results demonstrate the continuing progress and improvement in the school.
Meanwhile at Burnholme Community College head teacher Simon Gumn said: “It is particularly pleasing to see that the Contextual Value Added measure, a measure of how pupils progress over five years remains significantly above the national average. The irony is however, that this measure, which is based on the individual pupils’ potential, is going to be dropped by the coalition in favour of an English baccalaureate measure of how students perform in English language, maths, two sciences, a foreign language and a Humanities subject.
“Understandably we appear to perform poorly in this new measure since few students in this particular academic year chose to study a foreign language.”
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