Heath Mount Primary in Birmingham and Orrets Meadow school in Wirral top the “value added” league table, which measures the progress made by pupils between the ages of 7 and 11.

Children at these two schools were nearly two years ahead of the levels achieved by similar pupils nationally over the same period.

Heath Mount’s success comes after the school was failed by Ofsted in 2001. When Najma Chaudhary was appointed head, she spent her first year getting the school out of special measures by raising the quality of teaching.

“There has been a lot of monitoring of teaching, with colleagues giving each other ideas on how we can all improve,” she says. “It was very much the staff coming together and recognising the need to focus on the basics. Once you have sorted literacy and numeracy out, everything else falls into place.”

The school, in Birmingham’s Balsall Heath district, has an intake that is 95 per cent Muslim. More than 80 per cent of the 57 pupils achieved the expected standards in all three tests this year.

Chaudhary says: “Many of our children have parents who can’t help them because of their language and the lack of opportunities they had. They are very ambitious for their children and they expect us to help them.”

Staff at Orrets Meadow provide specialist teaching, particularly for pupils with dyslexia, many of whom have little or no measurable reading age when they arrive.

The deputy head, Janet Mayze, says: “The younger ones will come in as non-reading and writing, the older ones might have made a start.”

The school’s achievements are reflected in its results. This year, 20 per cent of pupils reached level four in English, the expected national standard, with 30 per cent in maths and 70 per cent in science.

Many special schools have felt under threat in recent years because of the Government’s agenda of moving children with special educational needs into the mainstream. But the Department for Education and Skills’ table shows their worth — three of the top six schools for added value this year are special schools.

The tables on this page show the top and bottom of the value added league. The first includes schools which score more than 103.3: that is, ones in which pupils have made well over a year’s extra progress since 2000.

The second table shows the schools that recorded a value added score of less than 96.5. This means that pupils were behind by more than a year compared to what was expected at 11 from their test results at age 7.

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