On Monday The Chronicle launches its Real Schools Guide - the region’s most comprehensive guide ever to state-funded secondaries.
Our unique rating system uses 24 different measures, put together from the latest publicly-available data and broken into four categories – attainment, teaching, attendance, and outcomes.
National league tables only look at GCSE results, which means schools that help all pupils make progress, but only get slightly better than average exam scores overall, may be overlooked.
Our system aims to move beyond such a crude measurement and give parents a better idea of which schools will help their child prosper, no matter what their background may be. The guide factors in other things as well, like whether all pupils are making progress, what attendance is like, the ratio of teachers to pupils, and whether students go on to further education or jobs.
Darren Thwaites, editor of the Chronicle, said: “Choosing a secondary school for their child is an important task for many parents and so any information that helps them to do this is to be welcomed. The breadth of the information in the 2014 Real Schools Guide is very useful to parents, enabling them to identify the schools which might be best suited to their child’s needs.”
The guide has been endorsed by schools minister David Laws, who said: “The more data families have, the better choices they can make for their children. Making data like this easily accessible shows which schools which are serving pupils well – so their success can be properly celebrated. But parents should also have the right to know which schools are currently letting pupils down and need to improve.”