It’s nearly time for students in Bristol to go back to school for another academic year. In this blog, I will be looking at the state-funded schools in Bristol and ranking them based on KS4 (GCSE) attainment in maths. Obviously there are many other factors to consider when choosing a school for your child, but as a maths tutoring agency we’re just looking at the cold hard numbers here.
N.B. I did intend to include independent schools in this analysis too, but many of the independent schools do not publish this data for public consumption. So I decided to leave them all out and just focus on state-funded schools.
All of the data used in this blog is readily available for free on the internet. I will be providing links if you wanted to take a deeper dive yourself. It takes quite a lot of wading through numbers to find what you need here, so I’ve done that all for you in this blog.
One caveat to this blog – due to the timeframes that this data is being published in the public domain, at the time of writing the most recent data I have available is for the 2021/22 academic year. So we’re around a year out of date, but it’s the best we can do.
How am I ranking schools’ GCSE maths attainment?
To rank the schools, I’m using a metric called “Attainment 8 Maths Score”.
This is calculated simply by summing each pupil’s GCSE maths grade, and then dividing this by the number of pupils (basically we are finding the mean). I then multiplied this number by 2. This is a much simpler method now that the grades have been changed from A*-F to 9-1.
For example, let’s say we had a very small school which only had 10 pupils. Here are their names and their GCSE maths grades:
| Pupil | Adam | Tom | Anna | Ben | Kelly | Mo | James | John | Neil | Tina |
| Grade | 7 | 4 | 9 | 8 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
To calculate the school’s Attainment 8 Maths Score, I’d sum the grades and divide by 10. Then finally I multiply by 2.
7 + 4 + 9 + 8 + 3 + 3 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 6 = 48
48 ÷ 10 = 4.8
4.8 × 2 = 9.6
So the school’s score is 9.6
The reason we multiply by 2 is when we calculate a school’s overall Attainment 8 Score (for all subjects) we multiply the maths score by 2 because it is considered twice as important as the other subjects. So when we isolate the maths section, we maintain that rule.
The league table
Below is the table. But before that, some caveats:
Trinity Academy in Lockleaze is a new school which only opened in 2019, and so they did not have any GCSE students in the 2021/22 academic year. So I have excluded them from this.
I’ve mostly included schools that are in the city of Bristol, rather than surrounding areas. I have though included Castle School, Marlwood School, Bradley Stoke Community College, Abbeywood Community School, Patchway Community College and Winterbourne Academy. This is purely because we do have a few clients whose children go to these schools.
I’ve not included special schools.
Here’s how their Attainment 8 Maths scores compare:
For context, the average score across England is 9.4. That means all schools from Marlwood upwards are on or above the national average.
The average score of schools within the local authority of Bristol is 9.2, so slightly below the national average.
You can download all the data I used in this blog for yourself following this link.
You can also view information about a specific school following this link.
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