St Aldhelm's Academy

Exam Results & Performance Context

Understanding a school's academic performance requires looking beyond a single headline figure. The Department for Education (DfE) provides several metrics to evaluate how well a school prepares its students for their next steps. For the 2024-2025 academic year (with a cohort size of 841 pupils), we have analyzed St Aldhelm's Academy's results against both local and national benchmarks.

Attainment 8: Raw Exam Grades

Attainment 8 measures the raw academic achievement of a pupil across eight core qualifications, including English and Mathematics (which are double-weighted). A higher score indicates better overall grades.

For 2024-2025, St Aldhelm's Academy achieved an Attainment 8 score of 33.6. To put this into perspective, the average score across all BCP secondary schools is 50.77, while the England state-funded mainstream average sits at 46.3 (based on 2023-24 data). Within the BCP local authority, St Aldhelm's Academy ranks 21 of 22 among the 22 schools with published data. It is important to note that this local ranking includes selective grammar schools, which naturally inflate the "All" average. Looking at year-on-year changes, this year's score of 33.6 compares to a prior year (2023-2024) score of 35.1.

We must also consider the performance of disadvantaged pupils. The school's disadvantaged pupil Attainment 8 score is 23.8, highlighting the ongoing effort required to close the attainment gap.

Progress 8: Academic Value Added

Progress 8 is arguably a fairer measure of a school's impact because it calculates the progress students make from the end of primary school (Key Stage 2) to the end of secondary school (Key Stage 4), relative to students nationally with similar starting points. A score of 0 means students made the expected progress; a positive score means they progressed more than expected.

Note: The DfE did not publish Progress 8 data for the 2024-2025 cohort because those students did not sit Key Stage 2 SATs in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning there was no prior-attainment baseline to measure against.

Therefore, the most recent available Progress 8 score for St Aldhelm's Academy is from the 2023-2024 academic year, where the school achieved -0.58 (with a confidence interval of [-0.81, -0.34]). This score places the school below the national average of 0.0. By comparison, the BCP average for non-selective schools during that period was 0.11, ranking St Aldhelm's Academy 20 of 21 across the BCP area.

The Basics & EBacc

Beyond the headline point scores, schools are measured on the percentage of students achieving a "strong pass" (Grade 5 or above) in both English and Maths. At St Aldhelm's Academy, 22.4% of students achieved this standard (with 44.9% achieving a standard pass of Grade 4 or above). This is compared to the prior year where 22.6% achieved a Grade 5 or above.

The English Baccalaureate (EBacc) represents a suite of core academic subjects (English, Maths, Sciences, a language, and history or geography) that the government considers essential for keeping options open for further study. At St Aldhelm's Academy, 13.5% of the cohort were entered for the full EBacc. The average point score across these subjects (EBacc APS) was 2.84. The average EBacc APS across all BCP schools is 4.56.