More pupils at Queen Elizabeth’s School achieve Cambridge University’s qualifying standard than at any other boys’ grammar school in the country, it has emerged.
The Good Schools Guide (GSG) has revealed that in the lowest-achieving state grammar schools nationally, only 2% of pupils achieve the Cambridge standard of AA in traditional subjects such as Mathematics and Physics, plus a B in any other A-level. At QE, the figure is 63.5%, placing the School in second place, just behind the girls at The Henrietta Barnett School, where the figure was 65.43%.
Figures from the Good Schools Guide also reveal that QE very successfully ‘adds value’: its score of 1039.4 placed it eighth in a nationwide table of 166 grammar schools (with 1,000 being an average grammar school score for the progress made between Key Stage 2 and GCSEs). It is an especially good score given that entry to QE is so competitive and that, as the GSG cautions: “The more highly selective a grammar school, the less scope it has to add value.”
Welcoming the findings, QE’s Headmaster, Neil Enright, said: “We certainly recruit very able boys, but that is only the beginning: we provide an optimum educational environment which enables our pupils not only to achieve high academic success, but also produces young men who are confident, able and responsible.”
Janette Wallis, of GSG, said: “The top grammars are definitely coming up with the goods but most people would be surprised by the huge range of results grammars are getting. We are concerned that some grammars are not doing as well as they should be, considering the selective intake they have.”
The GSG figures were published shortly after a report commissioned by education charity the Schools Network said grammar schools should be subjected to tougher targets than other state secondaries.
QE holds a number of GSG awards for GCSE performance. The guide’s description of QE includes the following: “An extraordinary school that offers the able, the diligent and the aspiring, whatever their social or ethnic origins, an education hard to rival in the state or private sector.”