These rankings are based on publicly available data from the Department for Education (DfE), University of Oxford, and University of Cambridge. We collect and analyse data across multiple cycle years to ensure robust and reliable rankings.
The rankings incorporate three primary categories of performance indicators:
Calculated as the the percentage of A-level exam entries submitted by the school receiving an A* or A. Gives an indication of the strength of the overall cohort.
Taken directly from DfE sources, and available only for English schools. Measures how much academic progress students make during their time at the school, compared to their expected performance based on prior attainment. This measures the school's effectiveness in developing student potential.
Evaluates the school's track record in securing offers to study at Oxford and Cambridge universities. This is a bespoke composite metric, derived from the Oxbridge offer rate, the raw number of offers awarded, and imposing a penalty for highly inconsistent performance over time. Owing to the suppression of small values in the Oxbridge data sources, we do not have accurate figures for schools receiving few Oxbridge offers each year.
We employ a sophisticated statistical approach to create fair and meaningful comparisons between schools.
Each of the three input metrics is standarised with a z-score calculation, representing how many standard deviations a school's performance is above or below average score for the cohort. This allows for fair comparison across different metrics and scales. These scores are then mapped linearly to give a score between 1 and 100.
z-score calculation: The z-score expresses how far a value is from the mean, measured in standard deviations. This standardisation enables fair comparison between different metrics.
Scaling methodology: After standardisation, each metric is linearly scaled to the [1,100] interval for ease of readability.
The scaled, normalised scores are then assigned a weighting and combined to yield the overall score. These totals are normalised and scaled in the same way to generate the final score according to which the schools are ranked.
In the England rankings, the three main metrics are combined with the following weighting ratio:
That is, Oxbridge Success is given double the weight of each of the other two metrics (a 1:1:2 ratio).
In the England + Wales rankings, value added data is not available for Welsh schools, so only two metrics are used, and are weighted with the following ratio:
While our rankings provide valuable insights, they should be considered alongside other factors:
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