This is our 4th year of improvements in the GCSE outcomes achieved by our Year 11 students. We are thrilled that the good work seen in our Ofsted inspection in February has translated into ever improving GCSE results for our students.
The Progress 8 measure is based on students’ progress measured across eight subjects and is a comparison of their progress against the progress of all other students nationally. As the results of all students need to be analysed to calculate this measure, this headline figure will not be available from the DfE until late September, however, initial outcomes show that Bluecoat Beechdale Academy expects that this will be favourable for the academy and we expect to be above national floor standard for the second consecutive year, having made even further gains compared to the 2016 results.
Comparisons of the Progress 8 measures in recent years indicates that, the longer our students have had a Bluecoat Beechdale learning experience, the greater the progress they make – regardless of their academic starting point and Primary experience in KS2.
We firmly believe that all students deserve the opportunity to succeed and we strive to remove any barriers to learning that our students may join us with. As a result, we are delighted to report that we continue to see reduction of gaps between the progress 8 outcomes for groups of students. Our initial analysis shows that 2017 the Progress 8 outcomes for boys and girls; Disadvantaged and Not Disadvantaged; SEN and Non-SEN students are all within 0.1 of each other. We are immensely proud of this demonstration of our desire and skill to enable all groups of students to succeed.
There are also a number of students that joined the academy late on in their KS4 or without having completed a KS2 assessment so they unfortunately do not contribute to the overall Progress 8 statistic for the academy. Many of these students have joined us as their first school in the UK and often with the extra challenge of having English as an Additional Language (EAL). In spite of this challenge, many of these students have gone on to be very successful.
Congratulations to all of our students that have worked hard to make progress we can all be proud of!
