The North West's 25 best-performing state secondary schools for 2024 - from brand new GCSE data

Some of the strongest performing secondary schools in England in the last academic year can be found dotted across the North West.

The government’s brand new preliminary performance figures for state-funded secondary schools were released last week, with primary school and sixth form data expected to follow shortly. Using this data, we’ve created a league table ranking the top state secondary schools across the North West region for the 2023/24 school year - based on their latest Progress 8 scores.

This is a unique figure based on GCSE results and other student achievements, which helps to determine how quickly students at any particular school are learning and progressing compared to peers arriving from similar primary schools nationwide. Any score above 0 is positive, while any above 0.5 is considered ‘well above average’ - the highest band available.

To further narrow it down, we’ve also made sure that all schools included on the list also had an overall Ofsted rating of ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ before this measure was recently dropped, or, if they’ve been inspected more recently, had passing marks across the board. This means that the quality of education provided, student behaviour and attitudes, school leadership and management, and student safeguarding all met or exceeded government standards last time the school was inspected.

Here are the top 25 schools from across the North West: