The Heys School

About The Heys School

The Heys School is a secondary school in Bury that currently serves 569 pupils against a capacity of 860, meaning it is running well below its potential roll. This is a significant gap, and it sits alongside a very high proportion of students eligible for free school meals: 46.6 per cent, which is well above the national average. Despite the spare capacity, the school is actually oversubscribed for 2025/26 entry, with 215 applications for 91 places and 77 first-preference applications resulting in 76 offers. That oversubscription ratio of 2.36 suggests strong local demand, even if the school is not yet full overall. The pupil population is mixed by gender, and the school has no religious character. It is a secondary only, with no sixth form, so students leave at 16. The headteacher is Lindsay Turner, who took over a school that had been rated Inadequate in its previous inspection.

Academically, the school’s most recent Ofsted inspection in June 2024 rated it Good across the board, including for quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, and leadership and management. This is a notable improvement from its previous Inadequate rating in 2019. However, the exam results paint a more mixed picture. The school’s Progress 8 score is -0.52, which is well below average nationally and ranks it 13th out of 14 schools in Bury local authority, where the average Progress 8 is -0.02. Attainment 8 sits at 41.3, and the proportion of students achieving a grade 5 or above in English and maths is 36.4 per cent. The EBacc average point score is 3.5, with only 18.2 per cent of pupils entered for the EBacc combination. These figures suggest that while the school is improving in terms of behaviour and leadership, academic outcomes remain a challenge compared with local peers.

The school offers a decent range of facilities, including playing fields, science labs, an astro turf, music rooms, art studios, a theatre, and a gymnasium. Sports on offer include football, rugby, cricket, tennis, dance, and cross country, and there are clubs such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, drama, choir, film club, and eco club. For SEND, the school provides for a wide range of needs, including specific learning difficulties like dyslexia, moderate learning difficulty, social emotional and mental health needs, speech and language communication needs, hearing impairment, multi-sensory impairment, physical disability, and autistic spectrum disorder. Given its oversubscription but below-capacity roll, families applying should be aware that first-preference applications have a very high success rate. This school is likely to suit families who value the strong pastoral and behavioural improvements noted by Ofsted, and who are comfortable with a school that is still working to raise academic attainment relative to the local authority average.

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