Year-on-year, GCA admits significant numbers of High Attaining Students (i.e. children who leave Primary School with the highest levels of prior attainment) from our extensive catchment area. We ensure that, on leaving GCA, these very able young people leave our school as confident, well-rounded individuals who have gained the highest possible GCSE scores and progress to ambitious post-16 pathways.

Our High Attaining Students’ (HAS) provision includes the following features:

  • Early identification of HAS on joining GCA (including extensive liaison with primary feeder schools and early diagnostic testing at GCA).
  • Rigorous academic target-setting to ensure that staff expectations of this cohort’s potential is appropriately high.
  • On-going monitoring of our HAS cohort’s academic progress by all Subject & Progress Leaders, who intervene appropriately to ensure high levels of progress are continually made.
  • A diverse & personalised curriculum, which ensures that our HAS cohort accesses stimulating and challenging learning (e.g. Separate Sciences at GCSE, access to all elements of the English Baccalaureate).
  • Excellent teaching, day-in, day-out, for our HAS cohorts ensures that the needs of this inquisitive cohort which thrives on challenge and independent learning are routinely met.
  • An exciting and very broad extra-curriculum (e.g. extensive sporting, musical and outdoor opportunities such as the D of E) gives our HAS cohort access to an inspirational learning experience which enables them to flourish as well-rounded individuals.

Our HAS achievement is very high:

  • Ofsted confirmed in their recent inspection report that “the most able achieve well and successfully reach the highest possible grades.”
  • In 2016, 20% of all GCSE grades attained at GCA were A*/A.
  • In 2016, the overwhelming majority of HAS students made excellent progress across all year groups.
  • In 2016, all our HAS students transitioned to challenging academic pathways at College or Sixth Form.

Our HAS destinations are very exciting:

The last few years has seen former GCA HAS students progress on to exciting destination such as

  • Electronic Engineering at Manchester University
  • Apprenticeships at BAE Systems
  • Pharmacy at Liverpool John Moores University
  • Chemistry at Leeds University
  • Law at Oxford University
  • Mechanical Engineering at Edinburgh University
  • Law at Durham University
  • Modern Languages at Lancaster University
  • English at Loughborough
  • French and Spanish at Manchester University
  • Dentistry at Liverpool University
  • Mathematics at University of Bath
  • English at Oxford University