I started the day with the secondary headteachers at the David Lloyd Centre...

It was great to spend some time with the secondary heads to talk about what we hav achieved together over the last few years and the challenges and opportunities that face us over the next few years. We must continue our relentless and uncompromising focus on standards and outcomes for all our young people with a renewed emphasis on our target groups; our looked-after children, our children on free-school meals and our children from some ethnic-minority communities.

There is no question about the change in culture, attitudes and intelligence which is driving this agenda across the secondary schools and has achieved some brilliant results this year. Colleagues in our secondary schools have achieved something quite remarkable and let's hope we can continue to deliver these improvements until we reach our goals for 2015 when we have committed ourselves to 80% achieving 5A*-C grades at GCSE with 65% achieving this with English and mathematics.
Chris