The School Record

Published admissions and inspection figures for schools in England, from the DfE, Ofsted and local authorities.

Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre

URN 136307 · Secondary · Academy converter · Reading

Surley Row, Reading, RG4 8LR

How many families applied

Preferences expressed and offers made at Year 7, as published by the Department for Education. These describe demand. They do not indicate whether any particular child would be offered a place.

In the 2025 intake, 182 families named Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre as their first preference, and the school made 245 offers.

That is 0.74 first preferences per place offered, which places it above 19% of schools admitting at Year 7 in England that year.

More first preferences per place than 19% of comparable schools position among schools in England admitting at Year 7, 2025 intake

Fewer families are naming it first. Across the 5 most recent years held, first preferences per place averaged 1.09 in 2021–2022 and 0.81 in 2024–2025.

Applications and offers at Year 7, 12 intake years
Intake 1st preferences All preferences Offers made 1st prefs per place
2025 182 402 245 0.74
2024 211 500 243 0.87
2023 227 507 250 0.91
2022 271 513 246 1.10
2021 265 562 248 1.07
2020 283 527 248 1.14
2019 294 536 276 1.07
2018 302 522 246 1.23
2017 223 482 249 0.90
2016 205 442 217 0.94
2015 217 434 217 1.00
2014 237 457 216 1.10

“Offers made” counts the offers the school made. It is not the number of places the school had, so please do not read it as one.

Ofsted

Ofsted changed its inspection framework: the current one publishes several graded areas and no single overall grade, while the previous one published an overall effectiveness grade. Each inspection below states which framework produced it.

Ofsted ungraded inspection, 27 March 2024

School remains Good

Ofsted's report for this school

Exam results

Published by the Department for Education for the whole year group. Figures for smaller cohorts are withheld by DfE to protect pupil privacy and appear here as a dash, not a zero.

Key stage 4 (GCSE)
YearAttainment 8Progress 8 Grade 4+ English & mathsEBacc grade 4+
2024/25 50.40 - 74.6% 30.6%
2023/24 53.50 0.25
likely between 0.08 and 0.43		 80.1% 30.7%
2022/23 53.40 0.07
likely between -0.12 and 0.26		 80.3% 26.9%

Progress 8 compares pupils here with pupils nationally who had similar results at the end of primary school; 0 is average. It is an estimate, and DfE publishes a range it is likely to fall within. Where that range spans zero, the school cannot be said to be above or below average.

Teachers staying and leaving

These come from the School Workforce Census, which follows each teacher into the next year. The numbers count full-time jobs, so a teacher who works half the week counts as half. They are not a count of people.

Census yearTeachers (FTE) Still there a year later Moved to another state school Left state schools Left in total
2024/25 88.5 78.9 6.2 3.4 10.8%
2023/24 89.0 75.0 5.8 8.2 15.7%
2022/23 89.2 73.8 6.6 8.8 17.3%
2021/22 89.7 69.8 5.0 14.9 22.2%
2020/21 91.5 79.8 4.4 7.3 12.8%
2019/20 87.2 80.4 3.8 3.0 7.8%

This is turnover among teachers. It says nothing about the headteacher or the senior leadership team: DfE publishes leadership retention separately and we do not hold it by school.

Catchment area

Nobody publishes a catchment area map for this school that we can read. That does not mean an address is outside its area. It means we hold no map, so we cannot tell you either way.

Where it is

The 6 nearest secondary schools we hold figures for, by straight-line distance from Highdown School and Sixth Form Centre.

Nearby and related

Where these figures come from

This page was made on 9 September 2026. "Retrieved" means the day we downloaded the data. It is not the day the data was written, so the figures can be about an earlier year. How we compare schools.