Scotland’s Best Secondary School: Ranks & Catchment Areas

This site provides a free one-stop overview of Scotland’s best secondary schools ranks and catchment areas.  Results are based on 2019 highers’ results – the last year when students sat exams.  Scotland’s best performing schools (band 1) are coloured in dark green and the lowest attainment schools (band 8) in deep pink.  The hover tool gives the names of schools available in each area with their ranks and the percentage of pupils awarded 5 or more highers.  Each school is also identified by a circle marker showing its location.  If you click on the marker a pop-up will appear with the school name, rank, percent attaining 5 highers, school roll and number FTE teachers.  Links to the school website and or Wikipedia website (where available) are also provided.   Note that catchment areas are available for the majority of schools, however, some local authorities do not make this available.  The data (comprising 344 schools) was compiled from many sources see below.

Notes

• Catchment areas with school ranks are shown for local authority non-denominational schools only.
• Each school is identified by in red or blue markers with a pop up which provides additional information and links to the schools website plus the schools wiki-page. Note these do not show on mobile devices due to size limitations.
  
• Catholic schools which have much larger catchment areas that overlap with several non-denominational schools are shown on the map with blue circle markers.
• Jordanhill School (Grant Aided) and Glasgow Gaelic Secondary School are also displayed as red markers however they have no official catchment areas.
• Orange zones on the map relate to areas where catchment areas for more than one local school overlap.
• White areas on the mainland relate to zones where no catchment area data is published. These include West Dumbarton Local authority which does not publish catchment areas and the area around Lennoxtown where a number of secondary schools are available for P7 leavers.
• No catchment areas are available for the outer Hebrides, Orkney or Shetland Isles since these areas have complex local arrangements.  For Orkney and Shetland a number of island primary schools feed into secondary schools offering S1 and S4 year groups before moving on finally to “mainland” schools offering S5 and S6 year groups.

Data Sources

Scottish Secondary School Catchment Areas
The catchment areas on this map were provided by Scottish Spatial Hub following a freedom of information request
https://www.spatialhub.scot.
Includes material derived from OS under Open Government Licence
OS data © Crown copyright 2020

Schools Rank Data Sources
Schools’ ranking data was generated by The Times newspaper. They produce these rankings yearly and most other newspapers quote the Time results.

The conversion of exam results into schools’ rankings is disapproved by many educational establishments but is an easy to understand metric much liked by the general public. Although the author is not comfortable using data compiled by unknown methods the author has been unable to find similar data on the Scottish Government’s Open Data sources.  Indeed any useful raw data that can be used to compare school performance was not found on any Open Data site.  Perhaps the Times has a mole in the education department!

Disclaimer
The catchment areas have been smoothed out a little in order to reduce the size of the web page download and will have slight differences. Parents should not rely on the datamap-scotland website to confirm the catchment area for any specific school or house within a zone as these can sometimes be very specific and may vary from data published by https://www.spatialhub.scot.  Many authorities publish accurate street by street data on school catchment areas on their websites.