Queen Elizabeth’s School has overcome all opposition to take first place in the 2013 Sunday Times Parent Power academic results league table of the top 500 State Secondary Schools. QE moved up one place in the highly regarded national table this year to overtake nearby Henrietta Barnett School for top honours.
The league table is based on a rigorous assessment of examination results, and QE’s statistic of 98.3% A*-B at A-level not only placed the School top of the Secondary State School table, but also matched the achievement of St Paul’s Girls’ School, which headed the separate table for the top 425 Independent Secondary Schools. QE can thus be considered to have achieved the highest position of any boys’ school in the country, whether in the state or independent sector.
The table was published only a matter of hours after Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, had presented QE with an Evening Standard Award for Academic Excellence.
“This double success is in many ways the culmination of a very good period for Queen Elizabeth’s School, during which we celebrated the achievement of our boys in securing QE’s best-ever A-level results,” said Headmaster Neil Enright.
“Naturally, it is pleasing to receive this recognition from the Sunday Times that the School’s results compare favourably with the best of schools in both the state and independent sectors. It bears testament to the hard work of both students and staff, to the support of parents and to the effectiveness of our carefully conceived system of academic support.”
The Sunday Times says of the tables: “Parent Power takes an exacting measure of excellence, assessing schools by the proportion of the top three grades (A*, A and B) achieved at A-level, which we give a double weighting, and the proportion of A* and A grades gained at GCSE. The government tables take a more benevolent approach of measuring the proportion of students achieving five or more GCSEs, to include English and maths, at grades A* to C.”