An independent guide to BCP secondary schools

What this is

Choosing a secondary school is one of the biggest decisions a family in BCP will make, and most of what's easy to find online is either the school's own marketing or a bare table of exam numbers with no context. This project exists to close that gap: one guide per school, each interpreting the same official figures — exam results, Ofsted judgements, and per-pupil funding — in plain English, benchmarked honestly against the rest of the local authority rather than presented as a raw league table.

We are not run by, funded by, or affiliated with any school, academy trust, or BCP Council. Every figure traces to a named official dataset (see methodology), and we say plainly when data isn't available rather than guessing.

Scope

The network covers all 25 secondary-phase schools that DfE lists for the BCP local authority (LA code 839), deliberately including a few edge cases — a middle school, a studio school, and a further-education college — so the picture of secondary-age education across BCP is complete, not cherry-picked.

• 4 selective grammar schools (11+ entrance)
• 18 non-selective secondary schools
• 1 middle school (9–13, feeds into secondary at 13)
• 1 studio school (13–19)
• 1 further education college (16+, outside the schools Ofsted framework)

Honesty notes baked into every guide: Progress 8 wasn't published nationally for 2024–25 (no valid Key Stage 2 baseline for that cohort, since SATs were cancelled in 2020), so guides show the dated 2023–24 figure instead of inventing a current one. Schools inspected after September 2024 no longer receive a single overall Ofsted grade — guides show the category judgements and date the previous overall grade separately, rather than making one up.

BCP schools at a glance

Latest Ofsted judgements across the network

• 14 — Good
• 5 — Outstanding
• 5 — Not judged
• 1 — Not applicable (FE college)

Applying for a place

All BCP secondary schools take Year 7 applications through the BCP coordinated admissions scheme: apply through your home local authority (even if it isn't BCP) by 31 October in Year 6, and national offer day is 1 March. Grammar schools additionally require sitting the 11+ selection test earlier in Year 6 — check each school's own site for its exact test date and registration process. Exact oversubscription criteria, catchment areas, and published admission numbers vary school to school; each guide links to the school's own site for those specifics rather than guessing at them.

Browse all 25 schools

Grouped by type. Schools with a live guide link straight through to their own subdomain; the rest are still being reviewed and expanded before they go live.