A student at Ark White City Primary Academy in west London
There are 30,000 students learning in our network of 39 schools. We’ve always believed that, with the right approach, every child has the potential to succeed. We work in the communities where we can make the biggest difference to children’s lives, and all our schools are non-selective.
It works: our schools achieve great results – significantly outperforming national averages, especially when it comes to driving progress – the best measure for ‘closing the gap’.
We take what we learn in our schools to develop new solutions and approaches that we can share. Over the last two decades, we have developed and incubated more than 20 projects and programmes, supporting them to scale and achieve systemic impact on the life chances of all children. Over 300,000 children currently learn using an Ark curriculum and our Ark Start nurseries are demonstrating a new model for early years education that we hope will become the norm.
78%
Ark is among the top performing trusts at primary. Seventy-eight percent of pupils achieved the expected standard or above in reading, writing, and maths – surpassing the national average of 62 percent by 16 percentage points.
At secondary, pass rates in maths and English fell nationally by 0.5 percentage points while at Ark pass rates increased by three percentage points. Disadvantaged students outperformed their peers nationally by this measure by 18 percentage points (61% vs 43.5%).
85%
Eighty-five percent of our sixth form students go to university at 18, compared to 37 percent nationally. Of those progressing to university, 74 percent attend a top third university compared to 41 percent nationally.
There is more to do, and we are currently planning how we can grow our network of schools and expand the work we do. Partnership is critical to this and our new home at EdCity will become a meeting place for like-minded education reformers.