Nottinghamshire is higher than the national average for GCSE grades for the first time. Over 60% of its students achieved five or more A* to C grades (including English and maths) in their GCSEs this summer according to provisional figures out from the Department for Education.
The national average is 58.6%, but the improvement for Notts sees it move up to 51st in the local authority league table from 79th place last year.
Nottinghamshire County Council’s committee chairman for children and young people’s services Philip Owen said: “We are understandably delighted. These latest figures show that we’ve clearly closed the gap on national outcomes on the Government’s main measure for achievement – five of more A* to C grades - which was introduced six years ago.
“We’re also pleased to see that the national issue over English GCSE marking doesn’t appear to have any noticeable impact in the county. This year 68% of pupils gained A* to C grades in English qualifying subjects which is up on the 2011 figure of 66.5% of students.
“Our teachers have been working hard, focusing their efforts on supporting pupils and raising standards and this is borne out by the results.
“The County Council has continued to support the conversion of further secondary schools into academies using external providers and this is a trend which is set to continue.”
Currently the county has 13 maintained secondary schools and 32 academies.
“And our initiative to partner strong schools with weaker ones is obviously paying dividends. In recent years we have commissioned a number of successful schools with strong headteachers to partner less successful schools to help them improve and boost standards,” added Coun Owen.
“We have also provided those schools with less positive Ofsted reports with intensive support. We’re also continuing to support and challenge schools through the school improvement partnership programme and have provided training to strengthen schools’ self-evaluation, so that they can determine where to concentrate their efforts.
”We are committed to making sure that all our pupils can fulfil their potential and we value all the hard work teachers have put in to make this happen.”
The provisional GCSE results for Nottinghamshire also show that:
87.4% of pupils obtained 5 or more A* - C grades at GCSE, an increase of 4.8 percentage points on last year. The 2012 results for this measure also put us ahead of all of our statistical neighbours which include Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. The national average is 81.1% which is marginally up on 2011.
The results across the county for those achieving 5 or more A* - G grades, including English and mathematics, stands at 96.7% up by 1.3 percentage points against last year. Nationally the figure is 93.6% which is unchanged since last year.
Commenting on the latest A level figures, Coun Owen added: “The stats show that the percentage of students achieving two or more A level passes is well ahead of the national average and it’s the same picture for the average point scores for each A level candidate.
“However, we acknowledge that there’s still a lot of room for improvement in this area. We’re ambitious for the future of all Nottinghamshire’s young people and will be working hard with our schools to build on this year’s results to improve attainment standards further at this level.”
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