The school’s performance data has been on an upward trend since 2017 and the most recent results were incredibly positive. The percentage of students achieving English and Maths has been increasing steadily with 75% of students gaining their English and Maths GCSEs in 2021. 

The Value Added for our sixth form students was +0.49 – meaning students studying with us did on average half a grade better than in similar establishments – which placed our school within the top 1% of sixth form institutes in the country (in 2019 before exams were replaced with CAG/TAG). This led to our sixth form being presented with an award for Outstanding Pupil Progress from the SSAT (The schools, students and teachers’ network) 

Please see below the latest results. 

Assessments 

Assessment at UCS involves checking that our students have learned what teachers and leaders need them to learn. The purpose of our assessment processes is to: 

• Diagnose how well students are performing at the point they are at in the curriculum. 
• Be a procedure for making inferences about the ideas, concepts, skills and competencies that students have acquired from a scheme of learning/specification. 
• Provide evidence that allow us to make a reliable judgment about student attainment. 
• Allow us to, as precisely as we can, forecast likely student outcomes at KS4/KS5. This means we can identify learning gaps efficiently to support student progression into KS4/KS5. 

We use two main assessment processes to improve learning: 

Formative, in class, minute by minute, responsive assessment such as questioning, low stakes quizzing, retrieval practice etc… 

Key Assessment Pieces that take place during or at the end of a topic, through a mock exam or an end of year assessment. 

One of the processes involved in Key Assessment Pieces is for teachers to go through a ‘question level analysis’ process to diagnose misconceptions and gaps in knowledge and in turn, improve the learner. Feedback for students is part of the teaching and learning process and following this, students may then be re-tested to demonstrate learning.