The Charter School Bermondsey

About The Charter School Bermondsey

The Charter School Bermondsey is a Good secondary school in Southwark, a rating it has held since its most recent graded inspection in 2017 and confirmed in an ungraded inspection in 2022. The school’s most telling academic metric is its Progress 8 score of 0.08, which places it in the ‘Average’ banding nationally. This means that, on average, pupils achieve broadly in line with expectations given their starting points. However, context matters: the school serves a community where 53.7% of pupils are eligible for free school meals, well above the national average, and its Progress 8 score sits below the Southwark local authority average of 0.46. Within the borough, it ranks 17th out of 19 state secondary schools on this measure. The school has clearly improved since its previous inspection in 2015, when it was rated Requires Improvement, and its leadership and management are now judged Good.

Looking more closely at the 2023/24 exam results, pupils achieved an Attainment 8 score of 44.6, and 56.3% secured a grade 4 or above in both English and maths. The EBacc entry rate is high at 85.9%, though only 28.2% of pupils achieved the EBacc at grade 4 or above. The school’s Progress 8 breakdown shows strengths in English (0.15) and maths (0.09), with the EBacc element the strongest at 0.27. The open element, which includes other GCSE subjects, is slightly negative at -0.18. Nationally, the school ranks 1,334th out of 3,141 schools on Progress 8, placing it in the 42nd percentile. In London, it sits 335th out of 487 schools. While these figures are not outstanding, they represent solid progress for a school with a high proportion of disadvantaged pupils, and the trajectory from its previous Requires Improvement rating is clear.

The school is oversubscribed: for 110 places in 2025/26, it received 302 applications, with 83 first-preference offers, giving an oversubscription ratio of 2.75. Facilities include a swimming pool, astro turf, tennis courts, and a sports hall, with a wide range of sports on offer from football and rugby to badminton and rounders. Clubs include the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, coding, gardening, and a newspaper club. The school has no sixth form, so pupils leave at 16. SEND provisions cover specific learning difficulties like dyslexia, moderate learning difficulties, social, emotional and mental health needs, speech and language communication needs, hearing impairment, and autistic spectrum disorder. This is a school that suits families looking for a genuinely inclusive, non-selective state secondary in central London, where the data shows pupils make average progress from often challenging starting points, and where the community is diverse and the atmosphere appears purposeful.

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