A CENTURY on after opening as Winchester County High School for Girls, The Westgate School, now a co-educational comprehensive, has gained national honours for its outstanding GCSE results.

The school’s GCSE English results of 83.5 per cent A* to C for Language and 89 per cent A* to C for English Literature have put its English department in the top six per cent of national state schools and third from the top in Hampshire.

The school’s overall ranking is in the top 11 per cent nationally.

Head of English, Catherine Baker, said she attributed this success to enthusiasm, high academic standards and hard work from both staff and pupils.

“We are fortunate in having committed colleagues who know pupils well and are able to support the needs of individual pupils,” she said. “Equally, pupils were particularly open to ideas about how to achieve, leading to these excellent results.”

Head teacher, Julie Turvey, said: “To hear that our results place us at the top nationally, in terms of our GCSE performance, is fantastic.

“We knew our results were excellent, but this is very gratifying.

“It is a testament to our outstanding teachers and support staff.

Equally, we must pay tribute to the hard work of students and the support of their parents. However, we are not complacent and continue to investigate ways of supporting students in order to give them the best possible education."

Mrs Turvey said she was also thrilled that the school had come third among Hampshire’s state secondary schools for the Government’s “value added”

progress measure, or Contextual Value Added, with a score of 1024.3.

She said that the CVA measure was the most important indication of a school’s GCSE success because it took into account every individual pupil’s progress from KS2, when they started, to when they left at GCSE.

This includes progress in English and Maths. Consequently, the higher the score, the more progress pupils had made: this was the value which the school had added to the pupil’s performance.

A score of more than 1020, according to Ofsted criteria, would be “outstanding”.