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Results
The ethos of St Bede’s is to celebrate success, whatever that success might be. We applaud those students whose brilliance is reflected in their GCSE and A Level scores: students such as Sophie Booth, who in the summer of 2008 picked up 8 A* grades in her GCSEs, or Alice Rudge and Lalia Dowse, who in December 2008 were offered places at Cambridge and Oxford, to read Music and Physiology. But we also applaud the honest toiler who, though not a natural academic, manages to achieve a selection of decent GCSE passes which enables him to go on to the next level of study, just as we celebrate the Year 13 student who gets a couple of A Levels, at last nails her Maths GCSE, and completes the Professional Chef’s course as well.
For this reason we are suspicious of any attempts to evaluate a school’s success through statistics, through league tables, through lists of results. This is not because such statistics cast us in a poor light: on the contrary, the figures released by the department for Children, Schools and Families in January 2009 showed that our “value added” figures for Year 13 students were the highest in East Sussex – suggesting that the improvement made by A Level students in their last two years here was really quite extraordinary. Our suspicion is founded on a number of factors: partly these are matters of mechanics (the more stringent International GCSE is not recognised by the government, even though universities prefer it and – for some students – it is the appropriate qualification); partly these are matters of philosophy (we just do not believe that a set of figures can do justice to the individuality of each student).
Those government value added figures suggest that, on average, our A Level students achieve a grade higher than they might be expected to do in each of their subjects; similarly, research conducted by Durham University shows that, on average, each of our GCSE students performs at a level about a grade higher than that which might have been anticipated when they joined the school.
For this reason we are suspicious of any attempts to evaluate a school’s success through statistics, through league tables, through lists of results. This is not because such statistics cast us in a poor light: on the contrary, the figures released by the department for Children, Schools and Families in January 2009 showed that our “value added” figures for Year 13 students were the highest in East Sussex – suggesting that the improvement made by A Level students in their last two years here was really quite extraordinary. Our suspicion is founded on a number of factors: partly these are matters of mechanics (the more stringent International GCSE is not recognised by the government, even though universities prefer it and – for some students – it is the appropriate qualification); partly these are matters of philosophy (we just do not believe that a set of figures can do justice to the individuality of each student).
Those government value added figures suggest that, on average, our A Level students achieve a grade higher than they might be expected to do in each of their subjects; similarly, research conducted by Durham University shows that, on average, each of our GCSE students performs at a level about a grade higher than that which might have been anticipated when they joined the school.
