Five secondary schools in Tower Hamlets have been listed as among the top 105 most improved in England.
Head teachers at Bethnal Green Technology College, Central Foundation, Sir John Cass Foundation and Redcoat CoE, Swanlea and St Paul’s Way Trust schools have been sent letters by schools minister Nick Gibb congratulating them.
Their success is based on the number of students achieving five A* to C grade GCSEs including English and maths rising every year since 2008.
Mr Gibb said the government’s encouragement of free schools would “increase the number of excellent schools”.
He added: “More schools are also seeing that becoming an Academy can help raise standards.”
Last year GCSE pupils in the East End as a whole smashed the national average for the first time ever.
Just over 60 per cent received the target grades including English and Maths, two percentage points above that for England.
But uptake for the English baccalaureate – the six core subjects of English, maths, two sciences, a language and history or geography, that the government wants to push – has been poor.
Earlier this year it emerged that only six per cent of pupils attained target grades in the six.
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