The top performing state schools at A level

A levels by subject

Selective schools in the independent and state sector are overwhelmingly responsible for the rise in A grades.

In the past decade comprehensive schools have seen a 5 per cent increase in the proportion of A grades at A level. Secondary modern schools have seen almost no improvements at all.

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These figures compare with spectacular increases in A grades of 14.9 per at grammar schools and 16.3 per cent at independent schools. The divide between selective and non-selective schools is expected to grow with the start in September next year of new, tougher A-level courses that will result in 2010 with the awarding of the first A* top grades.

Exam boards claim that the figures demonstrate that A levels have not become easier. Had that been the case, they argue, then there would have been equal improvements in A grades in both selective and non-selective schools.

There is, of course, an obvious explanation for this growing divide between selective and non-selective schools. As John Dunford, head of the Association of School and College Leaders, says: “Selective schools having the best results is the educational equivalent of the Pope being a Catholic.”

But it goes deeper than that. The rise in the performance of selective schools is partly the result of increased competition between universities, particularly those in the Russell Group, to attract the best students.

This has focused the minds of heads in independent and grammar schools, who have invested more in teaching, drilling for exams and reducing staff-student ratios.

There are other issues in play, too. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, accepts that as long as the Government remains committed to getting more pupils to take A levels, comprehensive and secondary modern schools are inevitably going to see less impressive rises in A grades. This is simply a question of numbers. Selective schools will always cream off the best students, but non-selective schools will always be required to absorb the greatest numbers of new A level students. And, inevitably, they will absorb more of the less bright students.

The trick in solving this problem, as Michael Gove, the Tory education spokesman, points out, lies in the significant minority of comprehensive schools that are able to buck the overall trend.

Given that comprehensive schools are less likely, on average, to have experienced a massive rise in A grades, why is it that some are able to buck this trend and compete on a par with the best in the independent sector?

“What we need to do is to take a good, hard look at what it is that these comprehensives are doing to see if it can be replicated elsewhere throughout the sector,” he said.

A closer look is likely to reveal that selection by postcode is a major reason why some comprehensives do so well, but it will not tell the whole story and Mr Gove is right to call for an investigation of the top comprehensives.

There are lessons to be learnt from the independent sector, too. Jonathan Shephard, general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, notes that one factor behind the success of his members is their ability to teach children above and beyond the national curriculum — and at times to ignore the national curriculum altogether.

Now there’s an idea that many heads — and pupils — would welcome.

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