Leicestershire prides itself on being home to an extensive collection of high performing secondary schools, and this year’s GCSE season has reinforced what excellent learning environments they really are.
The Government’s preliminary performance figures for state-funded secondary schools across England, for the most recently-ended 2024/25 school year, have now been released. This year the usual improvement-based Progress 8 scores haven’t been calculated, and instead, the default metric available to compare schools is their Attainment 8 scores.
These are a purely performance-based figure derived from pupils’ results in up to eight GCSEs or similar qualifications. They go up to 90 and roughly align with GCSE 9-1 number grades, with the national average being 45.9 this year - somewhere between the standard and strong passing grades of 4 to 5.
The celebrate the county’s schools which have excelled in this measure, we’ve created a league table of this year’s highest achievers across the Leicester City and Leicestershire County council areas. We’ve only featured local schools with scores of at least 50, and in cases where two had identical scores, they’ve been ordered alphabetically.
But grades aren’t everything, which is why we’ve also checked to make sure each school included had a positive mark in its latest Ofsted inspection. These are set to change this month, but for now, we’ve only included schools with either a ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ overall grade before last September, or positive ratings across all categories if they’ve been inspected since.
Here were the Leicestershire’s top 18 for 2025:
17. Soar Valley College
Soar Valley College is a secondary academy in Leicester. In a recent Ofsted inspection, it was found to be ‘outstanding’ in all categories. In the 2024/25 school year, it had an Attainment 8 score of 51.4 – compared to a local average of 45.4 and a national average of 45.9. | Google
18. Woodbrook Vale School
Rounding out the list as the last Leicestershire school with a score over 50 is Woodbrook Vale, a secondary academy in Loughborough. It was most recently rated ‘good’ overall by Ofsted. In the 2024/25 school year, it had an Attainment 8 score of 51.1 – compared to a local average of 46.2 and a national average of 45.9. | Google