A comprehensive turnaround

Queen Elizabeth's may have lost its specialist status but its pupils shone at A-level. Richard Garner reports

Today's A-level league tables are a tonic for staff and pupils at Queen Elizabeth's grammar school in Ashbourne, Derby-shire. They are the climax of an extraordinary period during which the school lost its specialist-school status – but retaliated by becoming one of the best-performing comprehensives in the country with a point score of 369 per pupil, the equivalent of three grade As for every youngster who took the exam.

The school had been planning a £7m rebuilding programme to sweep away its decaying lower-school site and replace it with a new sixth-form centre, plus playing fields. However, the school was told by inspectors that – because it had not been completed (it has now) – it was not meeting the targets it had set itself in the development plan it devised for specialist status.

It is potentially embarrassing for ministers to have such a high-performing comprehensive being deprived of specialist-school status – because they have so much staked on the programme and want to see it made available to all state secondary schools. Dr Roger Wilkes, the school's headmaster, who prefers that title to headteacher because he runs a traditional school, says: "Normally, you have to wait three years to reapply for specialist status, but we were told we could do so straight away."

He plans to apply for specialist-technology status – just as he did before. Despite its name, retained from the days when Ashbourne – a market town with a population of around 7,000 – had a grammar and secondary-modern school, the 1,230-pupil school is a comprehensive. Its history goes back to 1585, when it was first granted a Royal Charter. Until the early Nineties it still had two boarding houses taking the children of armed-forces parents serving with the British Army on the Rhine. These only closed when troops were pulled out of Germany.

The school has a mixed intake – the nearest alternative secondary school is 11 miles away, although it does face competition from two independent schools. And it has around 250 pupils applying for 211 places this autumn. So it is not as oversubscribed as some. What it does is to mop up the potential state school pupils in the area. Now that the population is growing, it is planning to expand.

Its success is relatively straightforward. Its head girl Nicola Oliver, 17, and Michael Pitcher, its deputy head boy,18, agree that discipline is strict. Uniform is compulsory right the way through to the sixth-form and the school operates a house system. Surrounded by playing fields, it offers every sport from rugby, soccer, cricket, tennis to hockey – it has just started a boys' hockey team and has a girls' soccer team.

It has a council representing every year group in the school. This has been widened from just having one for the sixth form – largely as a result of the introduction of compulsory citizenship lessons to give pupils a taste for managing meetings and taking part in debates.

It also has a dedicated and settled staff. Paul Benn, its head of sixth-form studies, has spent all of his working life at Queen Elizabeth's and is credited by the head as being the key to the school's sixth-form success. It does not have to recruit staff from as far afield as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand – as many schools in the South-east do.

The school has developed exchange links with Front Royal, in Virginia, a military academy near Washington DC in the USA. Michael Pitcher, who went out on an exchange trip last year, said that discipline was stricter in the US. One punishment was to be made to stand to attention for as long as an hour and a half.

One of the school's strengths is the broad range of subjects it can offer in the sixth form. Nicola, who is taking A-levels in psychology, history and English literature and has been offered a place to study law at Oxford University, says that one of the most popular subjects nowadays is psychology. Eighty sixth-formers are studying the subject – and a further 50 are taking sociology.

Fiona Birkbeck, the head of behavioural science, says: "We've had quite an increase over the last three years – since the introduction of AS-levels, really. I think they're all fascinated by the fact that they can study a new subject after GCSEs."

The students work hard and are given three hours' homework a night in their final year. One trend that Mr Benn has noticed recently is that sixth formers are spending more and more time working at part-time jobs. "I've been teaching sixth form for nine years and it has increased steadily over that time," he says. "Very few people used to do work at night time during the week, but now they do. It is partly because they're going to university and they know they've got to save money up. Between eight or nine hours a week can be beneficial, but once it starts going up to over 11 or 12 hours, results start to be affected."

Pupils argue that the new sixth-form centre – with its independent study area – has played a part in helping to improve the school's results.

Despite the school's undoubted success, you will not find Dr Wilkes among the army of "superheads" who visit the Department for Education and Skills to spread the gospel of their good practice to their neighbours. For one thing, he does not really have any neighbouring state schools, and for another, he prefers to get on with the job of running his own successful school.

Success, it seems, breeds success. Of last year's A-level group, seven took up places at Oxford or Cambridge. This year another six have been made offers conditional on their A-level results – and hope to follow in their footsteps.