How to choose a secondary school

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Selecting which school your child goes to can be a minefield. There are many questions to ask and a lot of information to sift through but to make things easier, here's your at-a-glance guide to choosing your child's secondary school.

Why are there so many different types of secondary schools these days?

They all take pupils between the ages of 11-16 but the way they are funded and the application procedure will differ from school-to-school. Here's a rough guide:

Academy schools - These usually have a history of failing their Ofsted inspection but can be transformed by huge budgets, which come from sponsors. The sponsors can be The Church of England, a local university, a football club or a large company. The sponsors are given a lot of freedom on how they run the school.

City Technology College - These are independent schools, which rely on funding from the business sector and from the Department for Education and Skills. They focus on technology-based subjects such as science, technology and maths.

Specialist schools - They are the standard curriculum but also focus on specific areas such as languages, the arts, science and engineering. Specialist schools team up with experts in their chosen field, for example one that focusses on the arts may team up with a national theatre company.

Faith schools - These are schools that put religious belief as the cornerstone of their curriculum. Some are paid for by the State, others are funded by a religious organisation, and others have funding from both sides.

Pupil Referral Unit - Often labelled as schools for disruptive pupils but this isn't always the case. Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) often teach teenage mothers, pregnant schoolgirls, children with learning difficulties, pupils that are or about to be excluded from school and kids with health problems that make attending a regular school hard for them.

What are league tables?

The school league tables are the overall results of each year's GCSE and SATs results. The league tables give you a view on how many pupils reached the required level in maths, science, English and reading. You're able to compare schools to see how the pupils have achieved.
Due to complications in marking Sats the Government has scrapped them for Key Stage 3, which is at age 14.
Although league tables are useful they are not a definitive guide to how well your child may or may not do. There are lots of other factors that affect these results, such as the number of children whose first language isn't English.

What about special needs?

All schools have pupils with special needs but if a school has more than 40% of pupils on the special needs register then this means that more than a third of the school have learning difficulties. You need to find out what extra facilities they have to help children with special needs and how many of the teachers are trained to help kids with learning difficulties.

By Louise O'Connell