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Shirebrook is among the best for improving pupils
Following on from your coverage of the school GCSE league tables last week, I wish to thank my staff and former pupils of Shirebrook Academy for demonstrating that students who come here make more progress than anywhere else in the county.
While we may not be one of the top ten performing schools overall – yet! – our attention was drawn to the value-added measure, which shows how pupils’ educational performance has improved from the age of 11 until their GCSEs. The scores are based around a mark of 1,000, with anything above that indicating that students made above-average improvement.
We were delighted to learn that, based on last year’s GCSEs, our score was 1020.1 – the highest of any school in Derbyshire, showing our students make more progress, given their starting point, than any school in Derbyshire.
We knew that we had an excellent set of GCSEs results last year and that it was no fluke. In order to help our students achieve their potential, we have given each pupil a personal mentor, have increased one-to-one tuition, brought in Saturday morning revision workshops and offered extra support at Easter, all in the run-up to the exams.
All of these initiatives helped us to record our highest-ever GCSE results, but the hard work of our staff and last year’s GCSE students were key. We always challenge our pupils to exceed expectations – and last week’s tables proved that they most certainly did.
Julie Bloor
Principal, Shirebrook Academy
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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