Exam Results and Destinations

The Department for Education has given the following warning about interpreting 2021/22 school and college performance data on the Find School Performance Data website.

Pupils included in the 2021/22 school and college performance measures will have had an uneven disruption to their learning. We, therefore, recommend not making direct comparisons between schools, or with data from previous years. Comparisons with local and national averages can be made cautiously to put an individual school or college’s results into context.

There are other factors that will also make direct comparisons difficult:

• Several changes were made to exams and grading. These include advanced notice of exam topics and GCSE, AS and A level grading being based around a midpoint between 2021 and pre-pandemic outcomes.
• Changes were also made to the way school and college performance measures were calculated. Results achieved between January 2020 and August 2021 by pupils included in this year’s measures are not included in the calculations.

For a full explanation of all the factors affecting these results please see the KS4 and 16-18 2021/22 technical guides.

The individual school and college data should be used with caution. It reflects a school or college’s results in 2021/22 but cannot provide information about the factors which may have influenced these results. When forming a view of how well the school or college is doing, you should consider a range of different information sources, for example, discussing with the school or college directly, the school or college website, Ofsted reports, friends, and family.