Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire · Stoke-on-Trent

St Joseph's College

Left the state sector entirely as a fee-paying independent school from 1980 before later returning — a history worth knowing before assuming continuous state-grammar status.

Founded in 1932, St Joseph's has a genuinely unusual trajectory: a direct-grant grammar school until 1967, it deliberately opted out of Stoke-on-Trent's Catholic secondary reorganisation and reopened as a fully independent, fee-paying school in 1980, before later re-entering the state sector via grant-maintained status and eventually converting to academy status in 2011. Its qualifying score of 105 is a modest pass/fail threshold on GL Assessment's standardised scale (population mean 100) — the school's own policy explicitly states no further reference to test scores is made once that bar is cleared, with places actually allocated overwhelmingly by Catholic faith category rather than by ranking. Reported to be the only grammar school in a non-selective local authority, though this wasn't independently confirmed against every other Stoke-on-Trent secondary school's admissions policy.

Key facts

Gender: co-ed
Age range: 11-18
Region: West Midlands
Local authority: Stoke-on-Trent
Established: 1932
DfE URN: 136460
Website: https://www.stjosephstrentvale.com

Admissions

Admissions authority: The school sets its own test and criteria
Entrance test board: GL Assessment — named on the school's admissions webpage, though not stated explicitly in the formal, legally operative Admission Arrangements document itself.partly verified
GL Assessment is stated on the school's admissions webpage but never named in the formal, legally operative Admission Arrangements documents, which refer only to 'the tests taken.'
Test format: Two papers only: Verbal Reasoning (50 minutes) and Non-Verbal Reasoning (40 minutes), no English or maths papers. Score is an age-standardised average of the two papers, marked anonymously. Scores of 103-104 are automatically re-marked.
Qualifying / pass mark: 105 (age-standardised average across the two papers) — confirmed identical across both the September 2026 and September 2027 entry admission arrangements documents, suggesting a stable threshold rather than one reset each cycle.
Superselective?: No

Catchment & priority criteria

None. The school's own policy states verbatim that it has no designated catchment area and considers applications regardless of which local authority area a pupil lives in.

Baptised Catholic children who are looked-after or previously looked-after
Baptised Catholic children with a sibling at the school
Baptised Catholic children of staff
Other baptised Catholic children — these four categories together capped at 125 of the 150 places
Non-Catholic looked-after or previously looked-after children
Other Christian children with a sibling at the school
Other Christian children of staff
Other Christian children generally — normally capped at 18 places, expanded to absorb any unfilled Catholic places
Non-Christian/other-faith children with a sibling at the school
Non-Christian/other-faith children of staff
All other children of another faith or no faith
Within the Catholic categories: practising Catholics (with a Certificate of Catholic Practice) rank above baptised-but-non-practising Catholics, and Pupil Premium-eligible children rank above others within the same sub-category
Final tie-break: straight-line distance from home to the school gate, then computerised random allocation

Results

Year	Attainment 8	GCSE 5+ Eng & Maths	Progress 8	A*–A	A*–B
2024	62.0 (England state-funded average 45.9, Stoke-on-Trent LA average 39.6)	80.0% (England 45.9%, Stoke-on-Trent LA 33.0%)	+0.81 ('Well above average', confidence interval +0.58 to +1.04) — this cohort predates the COVID-era gap. The prior cohort (2023) scored +0.67, also well above average.	—	—
A-level (193 students): average grade C+ (33.65 points per entry, England state-funded average 34.38), retention 95.1%. EBacc entry 94.8%.
2025	62.4 (England average 46.1, Stoke-on-Trent LA average 39.8)	77.6% (England 45.4%, Stoke-on-Trent LA 33.2%)	Not calculated — no KS2 baseline data for this cohort nationally	verify with school	verify with school
A-level (184 students): average grade C+ (33.9 points per entry), value-added progress score -0.3 ('Below average', confidence interval -0.39 to -0.21) — a real contrast against this same cohort's well-above-average GCSE performance history, worth surfacing rather than smoothing over. Retention 98.9%. EBacc entry 90.8%.

Ofsted

Rating: Under Ofsted's new report-card framework: 'Outstanding' in every category — Quality of Education, Behaviour and Attitudes, Personal Development, Leadership and Management, and Sixth-Form Provision. Safeguarding met. The previous inspection (2014) also rated the school Outstanding under the old framework.
Date: 29-30 April 2025
Report: Read the full report

Sources

1. DfE Get Information About Schools — URN, status, gender, LA — https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/Establishments/Establishment/Details/136460
2. School's own Admission Arrangements 2027/28 — https://www.stjosephstrentvale.com/wp-content/uploads/Admissions-Criteria-27-28.pdf
3. School's own Admissions page — https://www.stjosephstrentvale.com/admissions/
4. School's own History page — https://www.stjosephstrentvale.com/about-us/school-history/
5. Ofsted report, inspected 29-30 April 2025 — https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/50277664
6. DfE Compare School Performance — GCSE results over time — https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/136460/st-joseph-s-college/secondary/results-over-time
7. DfE Compare School Performance — Progress 8, 2023 and 2024 — https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/136460/st-joseph-s-college/secondary/progress-measures-for-2023-and-2024
8. DfE Compare School Performance — A-level qualifications — https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/school/136460/st-joseph-s-college/16-to-18/advanced-level-qualifications

Last updated 2026-09-01. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.