How we created our 'gold standard' for secondary school performance

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00:00Hello, my name is Amber Allett, and I'm a journalist specialising in education.

00:042025 is flying by, and before we know it, the beginning of the 2025 to 2026 school year will be here.

00:13This starts around the beginning of September for most parts of England,

00:16and as well as teens returning for a new school year,

00:19we'll see hundreds of thousands of pupils start at a brand new secondary school for the first time.

00:25It's natural to be a little bit anxious about this transition,

00:28and about whether your child's new school will be the right fit for them.

00:32There is no one-size-fits-all solution here,

00:35and grades are far from the only thing which makes a school a great place to learn.

00:40With this in mind, we've come up with our own metric to compare performance across state-funded secondary schools.

00:46Here's how it works.

00:49The key figure we use to rate school performance is what is known as their Progress 8 scores.

00:53While this official government measure is dependent on how well a school's year 11 pupils do in their GCSEs,

01:00it actually represents how quickly they've progressed compared to peers who performed similarly

01:04in their year 6 primary school assessment tests.

01:08For most schools, this will be a decimal figure between negative 1 and 1,

01:12with 0 being about average.

01:15However, some exceptional schools may have even higher scores,

01:18in our league tables, we'll usually order schools based on this number.

01:23But to balance it out, we'll also factor in information from their latest Ofsted inspection.

01:29These inspections are undergoing some big changes at the moment,

01:32but in order to be included in the list,

01:34schools must have had a good or outstanding overall grade under the previous system,

01:39or positive ratings across all categories under the new one.

01:42This means that the quality of education they provide,

01:46student behaviour and attitudes,

01:48school leadership and management,

01:50and safeguarding practices have all been found to meet or exceed government standards

01:55to help set parents' minds at ease.