85% of A-level students at Isle of Man high school accepted to their first choice university

We spoke to Richard Karran, head of sixth form at Ballakermeen High School.

Transcript

00:00Hello, my name is Richard Caron, I'm the Director of SIGFORM at Ballycombine High School. Today's

00:05been a really good day and you know I think you get a bit fatigued by people saying oh today's

00:09been a great day but it has been a good day because we've improved our A-star to B grades by 5%,

00:1628% of grades have been A-star and A, so we're starting to see a return from the dark days of

00:23COVID and we have to be honest they were dark days, they were really low. As a school and as

00:29an island we did struggle during that period of time and then obviously we had a very turbulent

00:36teacher strike that came in and around that time as well but for the last 12 months things have

00:40been calm, it seems that everyone's batting on the same wicket which is nice and the students

00:47are starting to progress and I think we've just finished the Olympics and everyone's been talking

00:52about processes and I very much feel that this is a process, very much like the athletes are saying

00:58because the process starts seven years before results day and I think you know especially

01:05the new boss coming in and the deputy head and the leadership team they've put together some

01:10really good processes for year sevens and I think now we're going to start to see a really clear

01:14picture of improvement at both A-level and GCSE. Amazingly today 85% of students getting their

01:21first choice at university, I've never seen figures like that and I worked at an outstanding school in

01:25England, I have never seen figures like that. Incredible you know just two kids in clearing,

01:31we had 36 kids last, two years ago we had 36 kids in clearing, this year we've got two kids in

01:36clearing, those kind of things are really important because really I know the A-stars and the A's are

01:42magical to look at but it is a bigger picture than that, it's all about every kid and the most

01:48important thing for me is that every kid walks out with a career path, a career plan, 48 kids out of

01:54136 are staying on Ireland which is great as well, big big numbers and 90% of those have already got

02:00secured jobs. So we're starting to see things working, don't get me wrong I'm not ready to

02:04resign, I've still got things I want to sort out and I want to really increase the numbers of C's

02:11going into B's because universities are starting really to offer only A's and B courses, the

02:18C grades are becoming quite hard to use as a currency at university

02:23and I want to make sure that the students who are going off on to jobs on the Isle of Man by

02:28the time they've left us 100% have got secured jobs, so there's still things to do but I'm

02:33certainly very pleased with where we are.