London’s Hasmonean High, recently ranked outstanding by Ofsted inspectors, has again demonstrated its educational prowess as the highest-ranking Jewish school in two categories in this year’s Department for Education performance tables.
Hasmonean had the best “value-added” score, which measures the academic progress children have made at GCSE from their entry into the school.
It also came out top in a feature introduced this year, showing the proportion of sixth-formers gaining at least two As and a B grade in traditional A-level subjects favoured by leading universities.
Executive head Rabbi David Meyer said the “outstanding achievements are the by-products of our broader educational approach which focuses on giving students the Jewish, moral and academic foundations to succeed in their future lives”.
He added: “While we welcome the government’s focus on subjects which feature within the English Baccalaureate [EBacc], we are also in favour of students studying subjects such as art and music if that is where their particular talents or passions lie.”
The EBacc is not an actual qualification as such but represents GCSE A* to C passes in maths, English language, two sciences, a language and either history or geography.
The Jewish school with the best EBacc result was Yesodey Hatorah, a state-aided Chasidic girls’ high school in Hackney, with 69 per cent of its pupils at GCSE achieving it in 2012.
Yesodey Hatorah principal Rabbi Avraham Pinter said: “We’ve always believed very strongly in giving our children as broad an education as possible.”
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