Kesteven and Sleaford High School

Kesteven and Sleaford High School
Address
Jermyn Street Sleaford , Lincolnshire , NG34 7RS England
Information
Type	Selective grammar school Academy
Motto	Educating today's pupils for tomorrow's society
Established	1902
Department for Education URN	137667 Tables
Ofsted	Reports
Chair of Governors	James Hoyes[1]
Head teacher	Josephine Smith
Staff	98 (of which FTE of 46 are teachers)
Gender	Girls (Years 7 to 11); Girls and boys (Sixth Form)
Age	11 to 18
Enrolment	763 (2023–24)
Colour(s)	Green, yellow
Website	http://www.kshs.uk/

Kesteven and Sleaford High School Selective Academy,^[2] commonly known as Kesteven and Sleaford High School (KSHS), is a selective school with academy status in Sleaford, an English market town in Lincolnshire. It caters for girls aged between eleven and sixteen in Years 7 to 11, and girls and boys aged sixteen to eighteen in its coeducational Sixth Form.

From the 1890s, the lack of secondary schooling for girls in Sleaford became a growing problem, but the county council lacked the funds to expand the boys' grammar school to take on girls. In 1902, a group of businessmen and gentlemen from Sleaford formed a private company to run Sleaford and Kesteven High School for Girls based in Southgate. A private school, it catered for boys under 8 and girls of all ages, including boarders, and had a preparatory department for the younger pupils; girls in the district could sit examinations to obtain a limited number of local authority scholarships which paid their fees.

In 1919, Kesteven County Council took over the school (renaming it Kesteven and Sleaford High School). It continued to charge pupils for their schooling until the passage of the Education Act 1944, when KSHS became a state grammar school and fees were abolished; the preparatory school was wound down as KSHS shifted to cater for girls over 11 only. A modern building complex was completed in three phases between 1957 and 1968 and the school acquired additional playing fields. Plans to comprehensivise Sleaford's schools came to nothing in the 1970s, after which KSHS joined Sleaford Joint Sixth Form (SJSF) in 1983 with the town's other secondary schools. KSHS completed another major building programme in 1996, became a visual arts specialist college in 2003 and opened another building in 2006. It pulled out of SJSF in 2010 and converted to an academy in 2011, before being taken over in 2015 by the Robert Carre Multi-Academy Trust, which also manages Carre's Grammar School. It rejoined the joint sixth form in 2016.

Admission to the lower school is through the eleven-plus examination (for Year 7) or the cognitive ability test (for Years 8 to 11); entry to the Sixth Form is not based on testing, though there are minimum qualification requirements. There were 763 pupils on roll in 2024. Teaching follows the National Curriculum and pupils generally sit examinations for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications in Year Eleven (aged 15–16). They have a choice of three or four A-levels in the Sixth Form, which is part of the Sleaford Joint Sixth Form consortium with Carre's Grammar School and St George's Academy. In 2023, the school received a "well above average" Progress 8 score; 90% of pupils achieved English and mathematics GCSEs at grade 5 or above, which was far higher than the national figure.^[3] The average A-Level grade in 2023 was a B, slightly above the national figure;^[4] much higher proportions of A-Level leavers go on to higher education and to Russell Group universities than the national average, though the government's progression score for KSHS's Sixth Form leavers assesses their rate of progression as "average" relative to pupils' prior attainment.^[5] An Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) inspection in 2017 graded KSHS "good" overall.^[2]