Value Added

Wychwood School has come 20th in the country in the new ‘Value Added’ school league table for secondary schools recently introduced by the Department for Education and Skills. Wychwood is the only school in Oxfordshire to come in the top 20 for Added Value and tops the performance of all other Oxfordshire schools.

Added Value’ for Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 4 is a new section in the school League Tables introduced by the DfES to measure the progress made by pupils between their primary school tests at 11 and exams at 16, and to give parents the opportunity to see the benefits of good teaching in secondary schools. The DfES calculations give a result for each school based on the number 1000. Every six points above 1000 mean that pupils at a school achieved on average one GCSE grade better than expected, compared with similar groups of pupils nationally. Wychwood’s score of 1066.5 placed it well above schools with a highly selective intake.

The Head of Wychwood School, Mrs Wingfield Digby, attributes this exceptional result to three factors: small class sizes, high quality teaching geared to each individual girl and strong pastoral support producing an atmosphere of calm confidence. She said, ‘Wychwood has always had a strong tradition of getting the very best out of each individual girl and our Value Added position is tangible evidence of this. We are not a highly selective school but we achieve excellent results and instil confidence into the girls, which makes a great difference to their well-being and achievement.’