12 October 2023

Dear Parents / Carers

We are now well into our stride this year. It is a cliché that time seems to pass ever more quickly, but it certainly holds true in 2023/24.

Positive Updates

There are so many good things happening in and around our school it is impossible to capture it all in one update. I would strongly recommend that you keep your eye on the news updates in this website but also sign up to the school’s updates on Facebook and X, if you have accounts. This will allow you to keep up to date with some of the great achievements made by our learners and colleagues.

There was a high attendance at the Parent Council AGM and the first routine meeting of the year. The Parent Council meetings provide the whole parental community with an opportunity to hear first-hand about the developments in the school and to ask questions of the office bearers and the staff members. Again, the Parent Council have their own section on the school website, and you can sign up for updates from them.

The Outcomes of Purposeful Hard Work and Resilience

One of the pieces of information that I was pleased to share with parents was the outstanding academic achievements made by our senior phase students. One senior manager in CEC Education service described them as ‘As good as the best I have ever seen.’

Without going into too much technical detail the outcomes are drawn from national data, and compare how our students performed in SQA-certificated assessments compared with similar students from around the country. (Please stay with me here!) It compares like for like, and measures how much ‘added value’ our young people gain. There are two tables: the first is about tariff points gained from exam results and the second is about the core skills of literacy and numeracy.

Cumulative Tariff Points

Yellow =  (statistically significantly) greater than VC, yellow + bold = much greater

Literacy and Numeracy

You will see that in all measures our students’ achievements were significantly greater than that of similar students outwith our school. You will also see that in the majority of measures our students’ achievements were significantly much greater than that of similar students.

It is no wonder that that these are described as outstanding and the ‘best ever seen’. We are so proud of our students, and I am personally very grateful my colleagues’ contribution to these successes.

Inclusion and Diversity (and yet more successes)

We continue to be the most socio-economically diverse school in Edinburgh. This provides our young people with an opportunity to learn and grow with peers whose life experiences can be very different to their own. Community cohesion and life-long mutual respect are inevitably improved as a result. Role models at Broughton HS come from the whole of the socio-economic spectrum, while the racial, ethnic and cultural tapestry of our school continues, as one elected member put it, to be ‘beautifully diverse’.

Digging deeper into educational outcomes, it is so pleasing to report that our young people with additional support needs and those who are ‘care experienced’ do even better than everyone else in school compared with young people with similar characteristics in other schools. We have so much to be proud of!

I end as I began this letter, with an encouragement to keep in touch with our school updates via our website, and our online presence. The direct links are here:   Facebook and X

Thank you for your continuing support as we move forward, very much in the right direction.

John J Wilson

Headteacher