Headteacher Neil Wallace said: “We are immensely proud of all the work and achievements of our students, especially after such a difficult and disrupted year, and wish them all the very best going forwards. Our teachers have worked tirelessly to ensure so many of our students are able to progress onto further education and study. I am particularly proud of our staff who put an enormous amount of work into developing a new process to accurately assess the performance of students following the government’s abject failure to prepare a contingency plan for exams being cancelled. It seems to have worked out very well in the end. How reassuring to have professionals making a rigorous, balanced assessment of what students have achieved. Far better than the lottery of relying exclusively on traditional exams. Now is the time for the government to build on the best practice that has been developed to ensure that we have a system of assessing student performance that is fit for the 21^st century. It is time to rethink assessment rather than blindly return to an ideological position that regards examinations as the panacea. How many workplaces really demand or prioritise a skillset of being able to cram knowledge acquired over several years to write it out on paper in a couple of hours under intense pressure? Exams have their place, but they should only be part of a balanced portfolio of evidence that determines grades in future. Let us hope that the government will be open-minded enough to learn lessons from this pandemic and see that there are other ways of doing things.

This has been a remarkably challenging year, yet students have shown great resilience adapting to online learning as well as the usual face to face education. Some of our highest achievers were:

 

Irene Zolla (3 A* and 1 B at A level, plus an A* EPQ)

Ruby Wade (3 A* grades plus an A plus an A at AS level)

Olivia Bailey & Ella French and Amy Harris (3 A* grades)

Anna Philpott, Jess Sinclair and Charlotte Walter (2 A* and an A)

James Saunders (A*, Distinction*, A, B)

Zak Heath (3 A and A* EPQ)

Bill Jones (1 A* and 2 A)

Tom Sparrow (A* A B)

 

Congratulations also to the following students whose grades showed they made the most progress from GCSE:

Guy Joseph (ABB)

Amy Harris (A*A*A)

Olivia Bailey and Ella French (3 A* grades)

James Bexson (ABB)

This year, following the government’s cancellation of external exams, grades were determined through a process of teacher assessed grades, against a national standard that were then approved and awarded by the exam boards. The government is not publishing performance data for any schools this year due to the varying impact of the pandemic and mindful that this year’s approach to assessment is different from other years thus making direct comparisons rather like comparing apples with pears.”