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Secondary School Banding, Explained (Unofficial)

The EDB divides STUDENTS into three allocation bands by academic results. There is no official "school banding" — every Band 1/2/3 school list you see is an unofficial estimate.

The official fact: students are banded, schools are not

Under the EDB's Secondary School Places Allocation (SSPA) system, Primary 6 students are ordered by their scaled internal assessment results and divided equally into three allocation bands (territory-wide and by school net, one-third each), which set the order of allocation.

The EDB states the bands are not an absolute measure of a student's performance and that a student's band is not retained after allocation. The EDB has never classified secondary schools into bands.

So where do "Band 1 school" lists come from?

Unofficial lists are compiled by media, admissions websites and tutorial chains, estimated from each school's student intake and public exam performance, often sub-graded into Band 1A, 1B and so on.

None of it is officially verified: different sources and different years disagree, and several publishers label their own lists "for reference only". Treating an estimate as an official label can mislead a school choice.

Our stance: cite, don't coin

This site never assigns a Band to any school. Below are the official explanation and the main unofficial estimators, so you can compare them directly — when reading any unofficial list, check its methodology and year.

Choose with facts instead

Rather than leaning on unofficial estimates, start from objective data — medium of instruction, fees and through-train links: