page_title: Secondary modern school
section_title: Secondary modern schools today
hierarchical_section_title: Secondary modern school / Secondary modern schools today
caption_attribution_description: English: Wetherby High School, Hallfield Lane, Wetherby, West Yorkshire. Taken on the afternoon of Sunday the 1st of January 2019.
context_page_description: A secondary modern school is a type of secondary school that existed throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland from 1944 until the 1970s under the Tripartite System. Schools of this type continue in Northern Ireland, where they are usually referred to as secondary schools, and in areas of England, such as Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Wirral.
  Secondary modern schools were designed for the majority of pupils between 11 and 15; those who achieved the highest scores in the 11-plus were allowed to go to a selective grammar school which offered education beyond 15. From 1965 onwards, secondary moderns were replaced in most of the UK by the comprehensive school system.
context_section_description: In counties still operating a selective system, as of 2015 there were 130 schools fulfilling the role of the secondary modern by taking those pupils who do not get into grammar schools. These schools may be known colloquially (though not officially) as high schools (Medway and Trafford), upper schools (Buckinghamshire), all-ability or non-selective  schools.
  The term secondary modern has completely disappeared in the naming of schools, although in 2013 the National Association of Secondary Moderns was founded by Ian Widdows, Headteacher at the Giles Academy in Boston, Lincolnshire. The organisation represents non-selective schools in selective areas and has held annual conferences since it was founded, the first in Peterborough in 2014 followed by a second in London in 2015 and a third at the QEII Centre in London on 28 April 2016. The 2016 event included speeches from Shadow Secretary of State for Education Lucy Powell, Tim Leunig from the Department for Education, National Schools Commissioner Sir David Carter, Steve Besley from Pearson, and Mike Treadaway from FFT. The 2017 conference was held in May.
  Ofsted continues to judge secondary moderns in the same way it judges grammar schools, expecting them to show the same academic achievement as schools that have had the top ability quartile removed. Ofsted admits it does not have a record of the number of secondary moderns and that its inspectors have received no training on how to assess them. They are preventing from awarding the highest grades to a school as that would require the data to take into account the differing intakes.
  In 2016, the Government introduced Progress 8 as a headline method to judge secondary schools, in which the sum of all the pupils' GCSE achievements was compared with the predicted grades, in order to expose "coasting" schools. Each grade achieved was worth one point. In 2017 for one year, they modified the method so a low grade was worth 0.5 and the top grades received 1.5, thus weighting the benchmark towards the most able. This disproportionately affected schools only serving the three less-able quartiles. Frank Norris, director of the Co-operative Academies Trust that runs eight academies, believes the changes will advantage high-achievers. "The proposed changes are based on the flawed thinking that it is much harder for a student to move from a grade B to an A rather than from grade G to F," he said. "They are probably discriminatory because they imply it is less important and worthwhile for lower-attaining students to achieve as well as they can."
caption: Wetherby High School; a former secondary modern; now  comprehensive school
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