Locatio LONDON | LIVERPOOL | MANCHESTER

Our take on schools

Whether you have school-aged children or not, the reality is, schools help shape an area. A school’s popularity with families can add desirability and sometimes a premium to what homes sell for.

Schools are often talked about in terms of their ‘Ofsted’ rating. But, there are specific measures to describe how well students do at school, and they break down into two parts: progress and attainment. The broadsheets and social media typically use the attainment scores to build attention grabbing headlines, and by extension, they tend to favour grammar schools, or other selective schools - the result, the same lists with the same usual suspects trotted out year after year.

Attainment

Where pupils end up

Test and exam results recorded at the end of a stage. These are easy to turn into headlines — and often favour well-known selective and grammar schools.

ProgressWhat we use

How far they’ve come

How much pupils improve from their own starting point, compared with similar pupils nationally.

“The ‘best’ schools are the ones that develop the children the most over their school journey.”

But, for many families, the progress or value-added measures are the ones that are more important, because the ‘best’ schools are the ones that develop the children the most over their school journey, and there are some fantastic ones that never make those lists. That’s why we share the KS1/KS2 progress measures and the secondary equivalent - Progress 8. These ‘value added’ measures track achievement from students’ starting points, and are compared with other similar pupils nationally.

So where does this leave us?

We present progress of both Primary and Secondary schools in each neighbourhood — primary schools within a kilometre, and secondaries within two. We list each of those schools, share their Ofsted rating, and give you a link out to their page on the UK Government’s ‘Get Information about Schools’ (GIAS) service, so you can start your own research.

1

How much schools add

How the schools around each area compare with every other area in the city, for the progress their pupils make.

2

Every school, by name

State primaries within 1 km and state secondaries within 2 km, named and linked, with Ofsted ratings. Where there’s no secondary within 2 km, the nearest three are shown.

3

Private schools too

Private schools within a kilometre are listed separately and aren’t scored — there is no comparable progress data for most of them.

We’ve used real Locatio data for the Stoke Newington area in London as our example here.

A radius, not a catchmentBeing near a good school isn’t the same as being in its catchment. Check with the school or council.
Thin evidence is flaggedWhere a measure rests on a single school, the tool says so.
No measure is perfectly fairProgress is fairer than exam results, but a school’s intake still makes a small difference.

Every day’s a schoolday here

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