If you’re a regular reader, you’ll probably know that I’m interested in the subject choices that pupils make. But one thing I don’t get into quite so often is why they make those choices.
Of course, subject choice can be influenced by all sorts of things, but today I’m thinking about just one possible influence: school policy and culture. Or rather, trust policy and culture.
I’m going to take a look at public data on entries to KS4 subjects last year broken down by trust to try and unearth whether some trusts encourage their pupils to enter particular subjects. And also whether some trusts manage to beat the odds and enter a high proportion of their pupils to GCSEs in languages – something that’s proved tricky to achieve at the national level – or triple science GCSE.
I’ll restrict this analysis to large trusts. For this analysis, this means trusts with at least ten schools with 2023 Key Stage 4 results. We haven’t made any adjustments for schools that have recently joined a trust.
