Academic Performance and Scholarships

Common Entrance Results

Common Entrance exams are taken at the end of Year 8. They cover a broad range of subjects and stretch children far beyond what would normally be expected for Year 8 children in many subjects. They are assessed by senior schools, which have the freedom to adapt the mark-scheme, making standardisation and comparisons inexact. Many academically selective senior schools require a score of 55% or even 60% to achieve a ‘C’ grade, with an ‘A’ often representing a very good standard indeed. The 2018 cohort can be proud to have achieved Common Entrance results for Town Close that came close to the excellent results achieved by our 2017 cohort. An impressive 67% were graded ‘A’ or ‘B’ and 88% of results were above Grade C, itself a challenging level for children of this age. These are excellent results for a Prep School with a broad intake and reflect the huge progress many children make thanks to a Town Close education.

Key Stage 1 and 2 SAT results

Town Close offers children a broad and stimulating curriculum which includes many disciplines not assessed in national SATS. We challenge children to grow and develop in all areas. Our children are entered into national KS1 and KS2 assessments so that their attainment in the specific disciplines measured can be benchmarked against a national cohort, though we keep results perspective and praise children for the effort and progress they have made. We deliberately refrain from narrow teaching or excessive practice testing, which only serves to undermine the usefulness of results and heap unnecessary pressure on children, and do not seek to maximise our standing in any league table collated on such narrow criteria.

The approach of putting wider education before narrow testing has nonetheless produced consistently strong results, especially considering that we do not select pupils according to their academic ability. Town Close has consistently had a higher proportion of pupils exceeding national expectations than the national average and a significant number of those exceed the expected standard by a large margin. This is thanks to pupils’ strong attitude to learning and the excellent teaching and pastoral care they receive.

Common Entrance Results & Key Stage 2 SAT'S Results

Key Stage 1 SAT's Results

Scholarships

We congratulate the twenty-four pupils offered awards by senior schools in 2019 as follows: