The School Record

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

Cotham School

URN 137440 · Secondary · Academy converter · Bristol, City of

Cotham Lawn Road, Bristol, BS6 6DT

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, 165 families named Cotham School as their first preference, and the school made 260 offers.

That is 0.63 first preferences per place offered, which places it above 12% of schools admitting at Year 7 in England that year.

More first preferences per place than 12% of comparable schools position among schools in England admitting at Year 7, 2025 intake

Little change. Across the 5 most recent years held, first preferences per place averaged 0.61 in 2021–2022 and 0.62 in 2024–2025.

Applications and offers at Year 7, 12 intake years
Intake 1st preferences All preferences Offers made 1st prefs per place
2025 165 670 260 0.63
2024 155 754 258 0.60
2023 164 691 237 0.69
2022 136 621 241 0.56
2021 158 614 243 0.65
2020 174 677 243 0.72
2019 148 698 236 0.63
2018 168 704 240 0.70
2017 216 736 210 1.03
2016 168 683 215 0.78
2015 166 656 215 0.77
2014 207 670 214 0.97

“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, 18 October 2023

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 51.80 - 71.9% 35.9%
2023/24 46.20 0.10
likely between -0.10 and 0.30		 64.8% 27.4%
2022/23 47.40 0.10
likely between -0.09 and 0.30		 69.5% 33.5%

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 94.9 83.7 4.4 6.9 11.9%
2023/24 88.2 80.7 1.0 6.5 8.5%
2022/23 85.5 65.8 8.4 11.2 22.9%
2021/22 83.6 67.6 8.6 7.4 19.1%
2020/21 79.6 70.8 3.0 5.9 11.2%
2019/20 79.5 66.5 2.2 10.8 16.4%

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 Cotham School.

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.