Woodham Academy is now placed within the top 20% of schools in England, based on a new ‘Fairer Schools Index’ which aims to give a more accurate insight into how schools perform.
Researchers from the University of Bristol have measured every secondary school in the country against a series of additional performance metrics, to improve on official Department for Education (DfE) league tables and remove some of the built-in bias against schools teaching children from deprived areas. In this new measure, Woodham moves up over 1000 places, now placed at 579 out of 3,259 schools.
Many educationalists and organisations have questioned the Government’s method of evaluating secondary school performance, known as the Progress 8 measure, suggesting it fails to take into account factors including the number of children from poorer backgrounds at each school.
Doing so potentially risks hiding systemic inequalities and providing potentially misleading conclusions about school performance, with regions like the North-East seeing its schools unfairly marked down because the areas they serve are not taken into account.
Head teacher Andrew Bell said: “Whilst a school should be judged on far more than GCSE results, it’s nice that the staff and students are being recognised for their hard work.
“Good results have been a feature of Woodham for nearly 10 years now, and we sincerely hope that our new building will simply add to this.
“From what we see with our current cohorts, we are very confident of even more improvement.”
The Fairer Schools Index has been highlighted by the campaign group Northern Powerhouse Partnership as it calls for a better way of evaluating schools in different areas of the country.
It is available for parents and carers to use by searching “fairer schools index”.