Published: Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 11:15 BST
While it is always uncomfortable commenting on the results of a whole year group as each individual student will have their own reflections on their performance, as a school we really were very pleased indeed with the overall GCSE results this year. A number of pupils performed at or significantly above expectations and both students and staff can be very proud of their efforts. There were a very encouraging number of 8s and 9s across a wide range of subjects, with some outstanding individual performances, while our overall pass rate was our best for a number of years.
This year, of course, saw the first year of the new grading system and of the demanding new GCSE syllabuses across the vast majority of subjects. This makes comparisons with performances in recent years difficult, but the table below shows how the old letter grades translate into the new numerical grading:
So…
- 9, 8 or 7 is equivalent to an A* or A grade (ie. 7 is equivalent to a firm A grade)
- 6, 5 or 4 is equivalent to a B or C grade (ie. a 4 is considered a firm ‘pass’)
- 3, 2 or 1 is equivalent to a D, E, F or G grade
- A U mark is judged as ungraded
College parents will be aware that for a number of years, along with a large and growing number of other schools, we have not submitted public examination results to outside agencies for regional or national League Tables. This remains our policy as i) to rank schools purely on academic results, taking no account of how selective a school is, offers little by way of valid comparison and ii) we do not want to measure ourselves as a school on such one dimensional criteria. We are, however, wholly transparent in sharing the full details of our results, and we always publish a full summary of our examination performances on our website (this year’s breakdown of results will be published once results are complete).
We would like to note the hard work of students and teachers alike in securing this very pleasing set of results, and it is good to see this being rewarded in the vast majority of cases.
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