Boys at Queen Elizabeth’s School make more progress in their first five years than pupils at any other grammar school in the country, according to new Government figures.
The Government league table reveals that QE is the top selective school in England when measured against the Department for Education’s Progress 8 figure, which records progress between the end of Key Stage 2 (the last year of primary school) and GCSE results in Year 11.
The statistics are based on this summer’s GCSE results, which saw 78.1% of examinations being awarded an A* grade or its numerical equivalent, 8/9 – a new School record.
Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I am delighted at the recognition of the academic achievements of our boys provided by this table.
“Some claim that selective schools do little to stretch their pupils and that they achieve good GCSE results simply because of those pupils’ innate abilities. The Progress 8 figures provide irrefutable empirical evidence that, for Queen Elizabeth’s School at least, such claims are simply untrue: we are very successfully stretching our boys so that they can achieve their full potential.”
Overall, QE’s provisional Progress 8 figure of 1.22 placed it 15th out of the country’s 6,530 schools and colleges in the league table. Furthermore, QE performed comfortably ahead of any of the 14 schools above it when compared against two other Government measures, Attainment 8 and the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), both of which are methods of recording pupils’ achievement in key GCSE subjects.
In fact, the newly released figures reveal that QE was England’s third-placed school for Attainment 8 and the second-placed school for its English Baccalaureate average point score, narrowly beaten in both cases by girls’ grammar schools.
Further analysis confirms that QE’s record of ‘adding value’ is a consistent one: when compared with the country’s other selective boys’ schools, Queen Elizabeth’s has been the best performer for Progress 8 and Attainment 8 in each year since these measures were introduced by the Government in 2016.