Buile Hill Academy

Buile Hill Academy serves families across central Salford as a mixed, non-selective secondary for roughly 901 students aged 11 to 16. It sits on Eccles Old Road in Buile Hill, on a site with a long local history: the school opened in 1973 where Salford Grammar School once stood, and carried the Buile Hill Visual Arts College name before converting to an academy in 2016. Since 31 August 2024 it has been run by Northern Education Trust, a large multi-academy group operating across the North of England.

The honest picture is a school still working back towards a good rating. Its most recent graded Ofsted inspection judged it Requires Improvement, and a later monitoring visit recorded genuine progress without declaring the job finished. For local families weighing a community comprehensive close to home, the relevant question is direction of travel, and there are signs the curriculum and behaviour are moving the right way.

The defining feature of Buile Hill in recent years has been change at the top, and the consequences of that change. Inspectors described a period of significant turbulence in leadership and teaching staff, followed by new senior leaders who were beginning to provide much-needed stability. That theme of rebuilding has continued through the trust handover: the school passed from Consilium Academies to Northern Education Trust on 31 August 2024, and the trust now sets the tone with a plainly stated philosophy of being outcomes focused and child centred. Northern Education Trust runs around thirty primary and secondary academies across the North of England, and brings the standardised curriculum planning and shared training that larger groups can offer a school working its way back up.

For students, the day-to-day experience is more settled than the inspection history might suggest. Most pupils enjoy coming to school and hold positive relationships with each other and their teachers. Behaviour was found to be improving, with many students concentrating in lessons and listening carefully, even as a small minority still disrupted learning at social times. James Haslam leads the school as principal, continuing the work of raising expectations that earlier leaders had begun. The school has tried to make personal development visible rather than incidental, and a newly introduced LGBTQ+ group is valued by the students who use it.

This is a comprehensive intake drawn from local Salford neighbourhoods, and the atmosphere reflects that: a community school doing the unglamorous work of raising expectations across a mixed-ability cohort rather than selecting for prior attainment. The setting carries some history too. The school opened in 1973 on the site of the former Salford Grammar School, was long known as Buile Hill Visual Arts College, and converted to academy status in 2016, so today's rebuild is the latest chapter for a long-standing Salford secondary rather than a brand-new venture.

Results are the clearest area of concern, and the school does not hide from it. For GCSE outcomes, Buile Hill Academy is ranked 3,615th in England and 11th in Salford, a proprietary FindMySchool ranking built from official results. That places it below the England average, in the lower band of schools in England for headline attainment.

The underlying figures explain the position. The school records an Attainment 8 score of 31.7, with around 159 students completing Key Stage 4 in the most recent cohort. Its Progress 8 score is -1.1, where 0 represents the England average; a figure of this size indicates that students, as a group, made well below average progress from their starting points by the end of Year 11. The proportion of students achieving the English Baccalaureate at grade 5 or above is very low at present, which reflects both the cohort's starting points and the curriculum disruption of recent years.

It is fair to read these numbers alongside the timeline. The 2023 monitoring visit found that curriculum improvements were real but had not yet fed through to examination results, which remained significantly below England averages. In other words, the foundations were being rebuilt while the headline measures still reflected the harder years that preceded them. Families should treat current results as a candid baseline rather than a settled ceiling, and watch whether the next cycles of data show the curriculum work converting into grades. The local hub comparison tool is a straightforward way to set these figures beside other Salford secondaries before deciding.

Teaching is the engine the school is trying to repair, and the trajectory matters more than any single snapshot. At the last graded inspection, some subject curriculums were at an early stage, with subject leaders yet to finalise the precise knowledge students should learn and some teachers unclear on what to deliver. Assessment was inconsistent too: in places, students were moved on to new material before they had secured what came before, making it harder to build knowledge over time.

Progress has since been recorded against exactly these weaknesses. Working across the trust, leaders have strengthened curriculum design so that subject content is increasingly well organised and learning builds logically year on year, with essential knowledge clearly identified and lessons giving students chances to recall and consolidate. The Key Stage 4 offer has been broadened, with more subject choice and dedicated time for personal, social and health education alongside religious education. Students choose their options at the end of Year 9 and then follow a two-year programme in Years 10 and 11, and the school supports the entitlement to study the full English Baccalaureate suite of subjects for those who want it.

Support for students with special educational needs and disabilities is a relative strength: their needs are identified quickly and accurately. The school also ensures that students at the early stages of reading receive structured help from well-trained staff so they can catch up, which matters in a secondary serving a broad span of starting points. These are the building blocks that have to be solid before headline results can move, and they are areas where the school was credited rather than criticised.

As an 11 to 16 school, Buile Hill has no sixth form, so every student moves on at the end of Year 11 to a college, sixth form, or training provider elsewhere in Greater Manchester. Salford and the wider city region offer a broad spread of post-16 options, from large further education colleges to school and academy sixth forms, which makes the quality of careers guidance especially important here. It is an area inspectors credited.

Leaders provide helpful careers advice, organise visits to local universities, and arrange for employers to come into school, all aimed at helping students make informed choices about their next step. For a community school, that early exposure to post-16 and higher education routes is a practical way of widening horizons before students leave, particularly for those who would be the first in their family to consider university. Families choosing Buile Hill should expect transition support and impartial guidance through Years 10 and 11, then a separate application to a post-16 provider for sixth form or vocational study, with the school's guidance team a useful point of contact during that process.

Buile Hill Academy is a non-selective comprehensive, and applications for Year 7 are coordinated by Salford City Council rather than made to the school directly. The published admission number is 180 places, so the school admits a sizeable year group each September.

Where a year group is oversubscribed, places are offered against the standard Salford priority order: looked-after and previously looked-after children first, then children adopted from outside England, then children in need under the Children Act 1989, then siblings of students already at the school in Years 7 to 10, and finally children living nearest to the school measured by straight-line distance. Distance is also the tie-breaker within any single criterion, with random allocation used only for exact ties. There is no faith criterion, in keeping with the school's non-denominational character.

The school is currently oversubscribed but not heavily so. For 2025 entry it received 238 applications against its available places and made 174 offers, a ratio of roughly 1.4 applications per place. Every family who named it as a first preference and was offered a place received one, which means demand is real but securing a place has not been the obstacle it is at the most contested Salford schools. There is no published distance-based catchment line that guarantees entry; proximity simply adds priority once the higher criteria are exhausted. You can use the FindMySchool map search to compare your home address against the school and weigh nearby alternatives side by side, and the saved-schools shortlist makes it easy to keep a few Salford options in view while you decide.

Safety and pastoral support are areas where the school has held up well even through its harder years. Safeguarding arrangements are effective: leaders run clear systems to keep students safe, staff receive regular updates and know how to spot signs of risk, and the school works closely with external agencies to secure the right support for students in alternative provision.

Students themselves report feeling safe and say they know there is always someone to talk to if they have a concern. When bullying does occur, staff deal with incidents quickly and effectively, which is a meaningful reassurance for any parent weighing a secondary place. Personal development has been a focus of recent improvement, with the school teaching students about safety and healthy relationships and giving them structured opportunities to lead, including through a sports leaders programme that builds responsibility and confidence. The combination of a settled safeguarding culture and improving behaviour is one of the more encouraging parts of the current picture, and it is the kind of foundation that has to be in place before academic gains can follow.

For a school of its size and circumstances, Buile Hill offers more enrichment than its results profile alone would suggest. Students take part in a range of clubs, visits and trips, and many take up musical instrument lessons, with tuition on instruments such as guitar, drums and woodwind giving students a route into performance and the discipline that regular practice builds.

The sports leaders programme is a particular feature, training students to organise and lead activity for others and developing the kind of leadership skills that carry well beyond school. The LGBTQ+ group, introduced relatively recently, is genuinely valued by the students who attend and signals a school taking inclusion seriously. Northern Education Trust also runs its own staff college, which channels teacher training, internships and apprenticeships into its academies, the kind of investment that, over time, tends to show up in the classroom experience students receive.

Specific term-by-term club listings change each year, and the school publishes its current enrichment programme rather than a fixed annual roster, so families should ask for the up-to-date timetable when they visit and check which activities run for their child's year group.

The academy day runs from 8.25am to 3.30pm. The school sits on Eccles Old Road in central Salford, close to Manchester, and is well placed for public transport, with bus services and the wider Bee Network making it reachable from across the city; the school can advise on the routes most used by its students, and Greater Manchester offers discounted travel passes for school-age children. As an 11 to 16 secondary there is no wraparound childcare in the primary sense, though enrichment clubs extend parts of the week. For current open evening dates, term dates and the latest uniform requirements, contact the school directly, as these are confirmed annually.

Results are well below the England average. The school's Progress 8 score of -1.1 and Attainment 8 of 31.7 place it among the lower band of schools in England, and the 2023 monitoring visit confirmed that curriculum gains had not yet reached examination results. Families should view current grades as a baseline and ask leaders directly about the most recent unpublished outcomes.

A long road back to good. Buile Hill has been judged Requires Improvement at successive graded inspections, including June 2022, and the monitoring visit since then recorded progress without confirming a good rating. Attendance and the consistent application of behaviour expectations were named as the areas still needing work.

A new trust, recently arrived. Northern Education Trust only took the school on in August 2024. Its wider record across the North is strong, but the improvements it is driving here are early, so prospective families are making a judgement partly on trajectory and trust capacity rather than on a finished result.

No sixth form. Every student leaves at 16 and applies separately to a post-16 provider, so families planning for A levels or vocational study should factor in that transition from the outset.

Buile Hill Academy is a community secondary in the middle of a genuine rebuild. Its strengths are real and matter to daily life: students feel safe and well looked after, safeguarding is effective, behaviour is improving, and there is meaningful enrichment in music, sport and student leadership. Its weakness is equally real, namely academic outcomes that remain well below the England average while curriculum reforms work their way through to results.

It is best suited to local Salford families who value a close-to-home, inclusive comprehensive with strong pastoral care, and who are willing to back an improving school under capable trust leadership rather than wait for the data to catch up. The central caveat is straightforward: results today are low, and a confident choice rests on believing the upward trajectory will hold. Families wanting proven academic outcomes now may prefer to compare nearby Salford alternatives on the local hub before deciding.