About this project
BCP Schools is an independent guide network covering every state-funded secondary-phase school in the Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole local authority. It is a personal project — not a school, a trust, or a council service — and it has no formal relationship with any of the institutions it describes.
How this is funded
By display advertising, served automatically by Google AdSense. That is the project's only income, and it is deliberately the kind that cannot be bought by the schools it covers: advertisers bid through Google's auction and never deal with us, so no school, trust or council can pay to appear here, to appear favourably, or to keep a figure off the site. An ad beside a school's data is not an endorsement and carries no editorial meaning. Our privacy policy explains the cookies advertising sets and how to opt out of personalised ads.
Editorial standard
- Interpret, don't just display. Every guide explains what a metric like Progress 8 or Attainment 8 actually measures, and compares a school's figure to the BCP average, range, and rank — not just the raw number.
- Local context first. Comparisons are benchmarked against other BCP schools, not just a national average, since that's the more useful comparison for a family choosing between local options.
- No invented facts. Every number traces to a named official dataset. Missing data is shown as "not published," never guessed at or shown as zero. Guides do not invent uniform policies, catchment boundaries, Ofsted quotes, or testimonials.
- Independence. No guide is written, reviewed, or sponsored by the school it covers.
Data sources
Snapshot date: 2026-07-24. Every figure across the network is copied from one of these official sources:
- Establishment: DfE Get Information About Schools (GIAS) bulk establishment extract
- Performance: DfE Compare School & College Performance — KS4 2024-2025 (Attainment 8) & 2023-2024 (Progress 8)
- Ofsted: Ofsted 'Management information — state-funded schools — latest inspections' (Nov 2025)
- Funding: DfE Schools Financial Benchmarking / Explore Education Statistics
Known limitations
This is a point-in-time snapshot, not a live feed — exam results, Ofsted judgements, and funding figures are only as current as the snapshot date above. A handful of schools in the network are structural edge cases with incomplete data through no fault of the guide: a newly-opened school with no exam cohort yet, two paired academies whose per-pupil funding is reported jointly rather than separately, and a further-education college that sits outside the schools' Ofsted and exam-performance frameworks entirely. Each affected guide explains its specific gap rather than papering over it.