Academic Benchmarking Is Live

It’s been over six months since we launched in beta. The response has been very encouraging — and the features and improvements have been coming thick and fast — and now we’re delighted to announce that we’ve just rolled out academic benchmarking.

Why did it take so long?

The short answer is that sourcing reliable data is a nightmare (more on that later). The longer answer is that we wanted to be thoughtful about the way we build these benchmarks.

In this post we’ll discuss what makes our benchmarks different, why we’ve made the choices we have, how to interpret what you’re seeing, and the limitations of our approach. Read on to learn more, and leave us a comment to share feedback.

More thoughtful benchmarking

We see several issues with many popular league tables.

Focus on top grades

You can’t move for league tables that focus on the very very top of the academic scale (A*/A). According to reporting from one such league table, less than half of all grades fell into this bracket (and it’s around a fifth for state schools).

Whilst it’s reasonable to expect that a school that ranks well on A*/A grades will have an overall better academic performance (a higher proportion of Bs and Cs too), we wanted to broaden our focus, and so we use the DfE definition of a “strong pass” (C+/B-).

This means that schools will do better in our benchmarks compared to most others when they deliver consistently “strong” results rather than focussing on the top 50% of grades.

Focus on Key Stage 5

Whilst senior schools will be rightfully proud of Key Stage 4 (GCSE) grades, what really moves the needle in terms of marketing, league table positions and reputation are the KS5 (A-Level) results and pipeline into top universities.

This introduces an incentive (in combination with the concern above) for senior schools to put disproportionate focus on the results of the very most capable in KS5.

We have created a single metric that is a weighted average across both Key Stages 4 & 5. This means that schools will do better in our benchmarks compared to most others when they deliver consistently “strong” results across Key Stages 4 & 5 rather than just 5.

No consideration of admissions policy

In the same league tables mentioned above, 6 of the top 10 are girls’ schools, 3 are co-ed, and only 1 is a boys’ school.

What does this tell us? Either girls’ schools are better at educating their intake and gender is irrelevant, or girls tend to have better baseline grades. The detail is for another post, but the current state of the research is conclusive on this question: girls have better baseline outcomes than boys.

Likewise, academically selective schools reliably outperform non-selective schools (for obvious reasons).

Our benchmarks strip out the baseline effects for gender and admissions policy, meaning that a schools’ rank is determined by how it performs relative to its admissions policy cohort.

What this means is that whilst a “very very good” non-selective boys’ school (relative to all the other non-selective boys’ schools) may be outranked by a merely “very good” selective girls’ school (relative to all the other selective girls’ schools) in traditional league tables, that won’t be the case in our benchmarks.

Only concerned with latest year

As with many of the changes we’ve made compared to standard league tables, we want to recognise consistency. Therefore, we don’t just look at the most recent year to build our benchmarks, we look back at the previous three years and weight the results from each so that the most recent years have a higher weight in the resulting score.

What this means is that the schools that deliver consistently strong results over time will do better in our rankings compared to standard league tables. A school that has a history of mediocre performance but has a significantly better performance in the latest year will get a label attached to it to show that its performance has improved, but it will need to maintain those strong results over time in order to climb our rankings.

Reliance on self-reporting

Many popular league tables rely on schools pro-actively self-reporting their results. We don’t want to suggest for a second that schools would fib in their numbers, but it does introduce a selection bias.

Smaller schools that don’t have the administrative bandwidth to sign up for the league table, or do not want to pay any associated fees, will not be included at all. Some of these schools don’t submit results because they’re nothing to brag about, but others may have exceptional results and miss the recognition that they deserve.

We use official DfE data that is auto-submitted by the examination bodies themselves, ensuring completeness and consistency in our data.

League tables aren’t that useful

Take a look at any league table and pick a school out of the top 100 at random. Now look at the school immediately above and below it. Now look at a few positions above and below those.

The actual difference in results for those schools will be incredibly minor, with one single additional top grade making a significant difference to the rank.

It’s a great marketing message for schools to gain an extra position in the ranks, but it's like one twin gloating over another that they were born seven minutes earlier. The reality is that all schools in the top 20 are SUPERB. 19 isn’t significantly more superb than 20.

The net effect

The net effect of all this is that you won’t find a ranked league table on Indeparent. Instead, we use our benchmarks to label schools based on the percentile they sit within (top 50%, top 10%, etc).

These labels won’t just identify the absolute top results from the top tier selective schools in their latest results, they will also highlight the schools that deliver consistently “strong” GCSE and A-Level results over time given their admissions policies (specifically gender and selectivity).

We feel that this creates a more relevant benchmark for more parents.

Sourcing this data

As hinted above, sourcing reliable results data is a nightmare (which is why most league tables rely on self-reporting).

In theory it’s trivial because there is an established pipeline of compulsory reporting from the examination bodies to the DfE. 

In practice, it’s more complicated. The DfE has a very clear idea of what Key Stage 4 and 5 qualifications look like, based on the national curriculum (standard GCSE and A-Levels). However, the “independent” part of “independent school” relates to their independence from the national curriculum, which rather throws a spanner in the works.

The DfE simply doesn’t recognise iGCSEs (very popular with private senior schools) and International Baccalaureates (increasingly popular).

As a result, many independent schools show limited (or no) data when they offer these non-standard qualifications.

We handle this by excluding data with small sample sizes and use maths to compare oranges to apples effectively (z scores, weighted average, and all that good stuff).

But, sometimes, gaps are unavoidable. A school that offers The IB instead of A-Levels (as opposed to “as well as”) will not be benchmarked for Key Stage 5 in our rankings.

As a matter of policy, the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) does not officially publish school-by-school results, averages, or league tables - so there’s no solution to this, unfortunately.

The other downside of relying on official DfE data is that government departments tend to be very slow. The latest data available is for the 2025 examination year, and 2026 is not going to be finalised for at least another month.

This will evolve

We’re pretty pleased with the end result. We believe that it’s a more inclusive benchmark that will be more relevant for more parents and will recognise smaller co-ed, non-selective schools that deliver exceptional results over time.

But this is also a V1. We’ve manually sense-checked these results as far as possible and to the extent that we’re happy letting it into the wild, but please let us know if you see anything that doesn’t make sense.

We can only deliver on our mission “to help parents make confident, informed choices, and to help schools learn and grow through constructive, well-intentioned feedback” with your feedback.