The Good Schools Guide (GSG) Award winning schools

Just announced the 2012 Award Winners - Congratulations to all...

Good Schools Guide Award Winner

These are featured on individual school pages. A full list of 2012 winners (for GCSEs and A Levels taken in 2011) by year and type are listed below. Click on a link to see who won what, when.

Award winning schools have the Lucas Winners Trophy (shown here) displayed on their school's page (overview tab). Whenever you see a trophy displayed, click on the icon to see the award(s) won by that school.

An explanation of how we determine the award winners each year is given below. Very well done to all!

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008 - renamed 2009 to reflect awards date rather than exams date

2007

Introduction of GCSE awards in addition to A-level.

Awards are also shown on the individual school pages (where applicable).

Putting the WOW into teaching...

The winners

If a school has won one of our subject awards, it has outranked all other English schools in its category, (Independent, State selective, State non-selective or All-England) for the subject and exam concerned: teaching is likely to be very good.

Note: awards for AS level are given in respect of students who do not take the subject on to A level. That these non-specialists do well and flock to the subject can be a good indicator of teaching quality in highly academic schools, where everyone gets top grades (making comparisons difficult).

How we calculate which schools receive our coveted A level and GCSE awards for teaching excellence

Each year we give awards to schools to celebrate teaching excellence in individual subjects. We base these awards on our WOW Factor calculations (50 is the average value, and 70 is a very good score)- a combination of:

Relative popularity
Relative performance
Absolute performance
Percentage taking

NB schools where all pupils get A* will not show up particularly well because it gets hard to distinguish brilliant teaching from brilliant pupils; in such results AS results can be a better indicator of which subjects are best in these schools, because they are for pupils who did not take the subject on to A level, and show a wider spread of grades.

1) Relative popularity. Subjects which are consistently well taught become popular over time, as pupils gravitate towards them. We measure the popularity of each subject relative to similar schools which offer that subject. As a measure on its own it can be a fallible indicator of quality - where a once brilliant department has faded, but pupils are still influenced by reputation, or where a preference for a particular subject area has become part of the spirit of the school.

2) Relative performance. We compare the performance of pupils in each subject with the grades that they got in all the other subjects that they took. Good teaching should lead, on average, to better performance. Note that some subjects are known to be easier than others, and that on this measure such subjects will always appear to be better taught than they are in reality.

3) Absolute performance. We weight top results

3 points for A*

2 for A

1 for B

Then average the result.

4) Percentage taking. The actual percentage of pupils taking a subject.

All the other measures mean little if they relate to a small number of students, so we bias such results back towards the average.

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