Woking GCSE Results 2026: Bishop David Brown Best on Record

The Bishop David Brown School in Sheerwater has recorded the best GCSE results in its history. The school says its Attainment 8 score has risen to 48.06, up from 45.01 in 2025 and 43.42 in 2024. That is a rise of 4.64 points in two years.

Attainment 8 measures a pupil’s average grade across eight GCSE subjects, including English, maths and the sciences. The school reports four figures for the class of 2026:

• Attainment 8 of 48.06, against 45.01 in 2025 and 43.42 in 2024
• 45% of students got a grade 5 or above in both English and maths, up from 42%
• 22% got a grade 5 or above in every subject they took, up from 13%
• 9% of the year group got a grade 7 or above in every subject

The school calls the trend the result of “a relentless focus on high expectations, ambition and our commitment to ensuring that every student has a life of choice and opportunity”.

Hoe Valley reports a quarter of grades at 9-7

Hoe Valley School on Egley Road is the other Woking secondary to publish figures. It reports that 25.11% of all grades awarded were 9-7, and that nearly 70% of students passed both maths and English.

Acting Headteacher Mr Kelly said he was “absolutely thrilled” for the students, and called the results “a testament to their incredible hard work and resilience over the past three years”.

The school does not say whether “passing” means grade 4 or grade 5. The two are different measures, and the gap between them is usually large.

Three of the five published nothing

Woking borough has five state secondary schools. We checked each one’s own website on Saturday 23 August. Only two had published figures.

• The Bishop David Brown School, Sheerwater: full figures, as above
• Hoe Valley School, Woking: figures, as above
• St John the Baptist School, Woking: a “Congratulations Year 11” post dated 21 August, with no figures
• The Winston Churchill School, St Johns: nothing on GCSE results
• Woking High School, Horsell: its exam results page still shows 2025

Woking High’s page carries last year’s set: 78% of students at grade 4 and above in both English and maths, 61% at grade 5 and above, and an Attainment 8 of 54.6. Those are 2025 figures. The school did publish results-day arrangements, telling Year 11 to collect provisional statements between 10am and 11am on 20 August.

Surrey County Council published no borough or county figures.

How Hoe Valley’s number compares

Only one of the local figures can be checked against a national one. Hoe Valley’s 25.11% is a percentage of grades, which is the same basis Ofqual uses in its official summer 2026 statistics.

Ofqual’s table 19b covers 16-year-olds only, which strips out college resits and is the fair comparison for a Year 11 cohort:

So Hoe Valley sits two points above the England rate for 16-year-olds and just below its own region. Ofqual’s table 20 gives the other useful marker: across all state-funded centres in England, 20.6% of grades were 9-7.

Bishop David Brown’s figures cannot be checked the same way. Attainment 8 and the “grade 5 in English and maths” measure both come from the Department for Education, not Ofqual, and the DfE does not publish them until October. There is no 2026 national Attainment 8 to compare 48.06 with yet.

Why there is no progress score this year

Parents looking for a Progress 8 score will not find one, at any school in England. Progress 8 compares a pupil’s GCSE results with their Key Stage 2 results at age 11. This year group sat no Key Stage 2 tests, because they were cancelled during the pandemic.

The DfE’s secondary accountability guidance, published on 16 October 2025, states that “it is not possible to calculate Progress 8 for academic years 2024 to 2025 and 2025 to 2026”. The department will keep publishing Attainment 8, EBacc measures, English and maths attainment and destinations, alongside the most recent Progress 8 scores it does have, from 2022/23 and 2023/24.

That matters when reading any school’s results. Attainment on its own reflects the intake as well as the teaching. A school with a tougher intake can add a great deal and still post a lower raw score, and this year there is no published measure that shows it.

Schools’ own figures are not comparable with each other

Every school chooses what to publish. Some give a percentage of grades, some a percentage of students, some combine English and maths, some report each separately. Bishop David Brown leads on Attainment 8 and on students; Hoe Valley leads on grades. Setting those two numbers side by side as a league table would be meaningless, so we have not done it.

What it means for you

If your child wants a grade checked, the deadline for both services is 24 September 2026, according to JCQ. A clerical re-check is completed within 10 calendar days, a review of marking within 20. Three things families get wrong:

• The priority service that ran on 20 August covers A level, AS and Level 3 vocational qualifications only. It does not cover GCSE.
• The request goes through the school’s exams officer, not direct to the board, and needs the student’s written consent given after results were published.
• There is no grade protection. A mark, and a grade, can go down as well as up.

If your child needs to resit English or maths, the November series is the next opportunity, and entries go through the school.

The grades issued on 20 August are provisional. Woking High School notes that final certificates arrive from mid-November and should be kept as carefully as a passport, because exam boards charge to replace them.

Woking College published its A level and vocational results last week: a 99% pass rate and 417 students into their first-choice university.