Westbourne awards record numbers of external scholarships

Caption: Congratulations to our Westbourne scholarship winners, pictured above and the 11 external awardees!

We are delighted to announce that a record eleven external candidates have received scholarships to Westbourne School, including nine new exhibition awards.

Open to talented pupils from any school, the annual scholarship week attracted twentyeight applications, seventeen of which were offered scholarship and exhibition places for entry into Year 7. 

Following an exam and assessment, the reduced fee places were awarded for academic achievement and for subject specialisms in music, drama and sport as well as a combination scholarship encompassing all four disciplines. This has included a series of new exhibition awards, which have been introduced to increase the availability of places on Westbourne’s advanced learning programme for higher achieving pupils (HAPS).

Each year a select number of pupils join the HAPS programme, which is one of the most successful in the city. Westbourne offers a bespoke GCSE programme to all its pupils with 17 options uniquely tailored to each learner’s choices. HAPS have additional classes and extension activities, which prepare them for their critical GCSE examination year. In addition, there is the flexibility for other pupils who are achieving the best results in core subject areas to have the opportunity to join the HAPS programme.

The GCSE success rate for Westbourne’s scholarship pupils is 100 percent in grades 5 to 9. In addition, last year’s overall GCSE cohort achieved record breaking results as 36% of all grades gained across the curriculum by all students, were at level 8 or 9 (A*), and 78% of all students gained at least one grade 7 (A).

Chris Hattam, Headmaster said:

“Our Year 7 scholarships encourage excellence and we are delighted to have been able to increase the number of subsidised places with our new exhibition awards, enabling the most talented students in the city to make the most of their potential. 

We welcome them to our advanced learning programme for higher achieving pupils which affords a first class opportunity to enhance their learning in the subject areas for which they have particular strengths, skills and passion. Our scholarship pupils’ GCSE results, and their 100 percent pass rate, speak for themselves.”

“Further, we are proud that nearly all our Year 11 pupils, who are going on to Sixth Form are accepted by their first choice of school or college, a record that has been sustained for nearly twenty years.”