New figures from the Government have shown that on average, pupils at Park House School made the most academic progress in West Berkshire last year.
The Department for Education has released its 2024 performance data for all schools, and Park House was found to be ‘well above average’ when compared to other schools around the country and it is in the top five per cent for academic progress nationally.
The Wash Common school –which became an academy in 2022 after it was rated inadequate by Ofsted– received a 0.6 Progress 8 score in 2024, the highest in the district for academies and maintained schools.
Park House School tops West Berkshire leaderboard for academic progress in 2024
Progress 8 illustrates how much progress pupils make between the end of key stage 2 (Year 6) and the end of key stage 4 (Year 11) by comparing a cohort’s SAT grades with their GCSE ones.
A score of 0.6 means that on average, Park House pupils achieved just over half a grade better in all qualifications when compared to other schoolchildren of a similar ability.
Headteacher James King and deputy headteacher Jack Markey said that the score had “massively surpassed” expectations.
They hoped that their 2023 score of 0.3 would be bettered, a score they were already “really happy” with.
Mr King said: “It was a very pleasant surprise. We are really pleased. We knew they had done well, we just weren’t quite sure how well they had done.
“In light of grades going down nationally, you are never quite sure, but we knew they had worked incredibly hard.
“Our teachers had put them in an incredibly good spot so we just held our breath and we were excited to see what they got.”
Mr Markey said that doing “all the little things really well” and making “incremental improvements” has been the key to the school’s recent academic success.
He also said there was no “magic bullet” method that would suddenly help a struggling school.
Mr Markey added: “The kids have always been amazing. They are an incredible bunch from Year 7 through to Year 13, and we just really tightened up behaviour in lessons.”
Headteacher James King and deputy headteacher Jack Markey
He also believed that improvements in teaching, the availability of extra revision sessions and making lessons more accessible to learners of every ability were other reasons for the upturn in academic progress.
Mr Markey explained: “Put yourself into the shoes of the most vulnerable learner.
“If they know that when they get to a lesson, they are going to come in, there’s going to be five questions on the board for them, they know how their teacher is going to ask them to do certain things, they know the expectations of them and they are in a calm working environment, they are going to thrive.
“That’s not just good practice for those students. That’s good practice for everyone.”
Mr King added: “When we got here and we looked at the student body and teachers and how on board they all were, we knew this was a +1 school in everything but the outcomes.
“That is now starting to become a bit of a reality.
“We are never going to be guilty of sitting still because if you do sit still, you go backwards. It is easy for things to unravel.
“This has always been a decent school, but it unravelled slightly a few years ago and we are just very keen for that not to be the case again.”
Park House became an academy and came under the responsibility of the Greenshaw Learning Trust in 2022 after Ofsted proclaimed that the school was “in a state of turmoil”, deeming the quality of education, behaviour and attitude, and leadership and management as inadequate.
This was when Mr King took charge. He came in with a comprehensive school improvement plan to try to turn things around.
Mr King acknowledged the “little pockets of negative noise” that had surrounded the school since he took over its leadership.
A small number of pupils were banned from their 2023 prom because they had underperformed in the classroom which drew the ire of their parents, and a petition which gained over 380 signatures called for Park House to loosen its new, stricter behavioural policy.
However, Mr King believed this new data showed that the current and future state of Park House was looking “incredibly positive”.
He said: “I think people looked at what we were doing and thought that this doesn’t suit everyone in terms of our methodology.
“But what is really clear is that it does. It justifies everything that we are doing and our rationale for doing things.
“We will keep going because we know what we are doing is right and the pupils deserve it.”
Due to the pandemic and pupils not being able to take their SATs, there will be no Progress 8 scores for schools over the next two years.
Mr King said: “It is frustrating that there will be no Progress 8, but in two years’ time it will be really interesting to see the kids that have come through here under five years of doing it the way we want to do things.
“I think we can get really excited about how well they will perform.”