About localschool

It combines the school’s latest Ofsted judgement - an overall word for an older inspection, a report card’s area grades for one since November 2025, and the two are graded differently enough that we never convert one into the other (what changed) - with its published exam results: Progress 8, Attainment 8 and grade 5 or above in English and maths for secondaries; reading, writing and maths at the expected and the higher standard for primaries. Every school page lists exactly which measures went into its own score.

For a secondary school with everything published, the weights are Ofsted 40%, grade 5+ in English and maths 35%, Progress 8 15% and Attainment 8 10%. A measure a school has not published does not lower the score - the remaining weights redistribute over what it has - and checked against the current data, Ofsted never ends up as more than half of any school’s score, primary or secondary.

Why not just show the published number on its own? Because a raw figure does not mean the same thing on every phase or measure - around three in five primary pupils reach the expected standard, but only two in five secondary pupils get a grade 5, so comparing the two raw would make every primary look better than every secondary. Each measure is instead read as a position among comparable schools, so a school right in the middle of the country scores five for it.

• Special schools and pupil referral units are not scored. The published measures describe how close a cohort came to a mainstream standard, and a school whose intake is defined by need would be marked down for doing exactly what it exists to do.
• Schools are ordered by this score, but only ever within one area and one phase - “fourth of eleven secondary schools in Nailsea”. There is no national league table, and there will not be one: ranking the whole country by attainment mostly measures who attends, which is why every such table is topped by selective and independent schools.

The honest limit: attainment tracks intake heavily, so even a local score partly describes who attends a school rather than what the school adds. Progress 8 is the fairest of the ingredients for exactly that reason. Treat the score as a way to shortlist, then read the figures underneath it - they are all on the page, shown against the national average, and they are what actually tells you something.