The North West's 21 top-performing state sixth forms for A Levels in 2025 - from latest exam results data

The North West is playing with the big boys when it comes to supporting students to reach their A Level potential, with many of the country’s very highest performing schools to be found dotted across the region.

The Government released the latest performance figures for state-funded sixth form colleges and secondary schools last week, meaning England’s top A Level performers have now been named. We’ve used this new data to compare how those across the North West’s local authority areas did, from Cumbria to Cheshire, Liverpool to Manchester, to create a league table of its stand-out sixth forms in the 2023/24 school year.

They have been ranked by their A Level performance point scores, a unique measurement derived from students’ A Level results that gives them a score out of 60. You’ll also see the overall ‘average grades’ each school’s students achieved across their A Level entries - and we’ve only included those with at least a B average.

We also checked that each school included had an overall Ofsted rating of ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ before this measure was recently dropped, or, if they’ve been inspected more recently, had at least ‘good’ grades across the board - with the exception being one brand new school without a ranking yet. This means that the quality of education provided, student behaviour and attitudes, school leadership and management and student safeguarding were all found to meet or exceed government standards last time the school was inspected.

Here were the 21 state sixth forms from across the North West that made the grade: