Northamptonshire's 14 top state secondary schools of 2024 - based on Ofsted and new GCSE performance data

Picking out the right secondary school for 2025’s primary school leavers will be no easy feat for Northamptonshire families - with plenty of great schools on offer, each with their own strengths.

The government’s brand new preliminary performance figures for state-funded secondary schools are out now, after delays due to “quality issues”. Using this data, we’ve created a league table ranking the top state secondary schools across the North and West Northamptonshire Council areas for the 2023/24 school year - based on their latest Progress 8 scores.

This is a unique figure based on GCSE results and other student achievements, which demonstrates how well a secondary school’s pupils developed their academic skills compared to peers starting from similar primary schools nationwide. Any score above 0 is positive, and we’ve picked out only the highest performers.

You can also check out the best-performing secondary schools across the East Midlands as a whole here.

We’ve also made sure that all schools included on the list also had an overall Ofsted rating of ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ before this measure was recently dropped, or, if they’ve been inspected more recently, had at least ‘good’ grades across the board. This means that some high-achieving schools haven’t been included, if the quality of education, student behaviour and attitudes, school leadership and management, or safeguarding practices did not meet government standards the last time the school was inspected.

Here are the 14 Northamptonshire schools that made the grade: