Ysgol John Bright, Llandudno

Ysgol John Bright is an English-medium school in Wales. Welsh schools are inspected by Estyn rather than Ofsted, and its latest report is published on Estyn's website.

It had 1065 pupils in the 2025/26 school census.

18% of pupils are eligible for free school meals (three-year average).

Of its pupils, 6% have additional learning needs (25% in 2020/21); 5% are learning English as an additional language; and 15% are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Year groups range from 77 pupils (Year 13) to 197 (Year 10).

Its delegated budget for 2026-27 works out at £6,765 per pupil, against £5,137 in 2021-22. It carried forward £384k of reserves at the end of 2024-25.

Estyn's report on its November 2023 inspection summarises Ysgol John Bright like this:

"Ysgol John Bright is a supportive community of learning where leaders and staff encourage all learners to reach both their academic potential and personal goals. The school provides a safe, nurturing and encouraging environment alongside high levels of care that enables pupils to learn, grow and develop into mature and responsible individuals. A notable strength of the school is the extensive range of curricular choices for pupils. These include relevant vocational, practical and academic subjects, which reflect pupils’ aspirations and the employment needs of the local area. In addition, the school provides a wide variety of extra-curricular activities and sporting clubs for all its pupils including an annual musical production, which is staged in the town’s theatre. Overall, many pupils seize the valuable learning and social opportunities offered to them and make considerable progress in their personal development by the time they leave school. In many lessons, teachers plan a broad range of learning activities to enable pupils to develop their subject knowledge and understanding."

"In a few lessons, teachers’ planning is particularly successful in securing strong, sustained pupil progress. In these cases, teachers have high expectations and ask challenging and probing questions to stimulate pupils’ thinking and ideas. However, teachers do not maximise opportunities to develop pupils’ literacy skills within their subject area. In addition, in relevant subjects, teachers do not plan numeracy tasks carefully enough to ensure pupils make consistent progress. Overall, planning for the progressive development of pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills is underdeveloped. The headteacher is a thoughtful and considerate leader who provides support and robust challenge to his staff. He has high aspirations for the school as a community of learning."

"Together with the senior leadership team and staff, he has forged a productive partnership with other education providers, external organisations and local charities such as Tŷ Hapus to ensure that pupils, including those from low- income households, obtain valuable academic and social learning opportunities. Leaders at all levels use a broad range of evidence to consider the quality and effectiveness of their work. They are developing well their ability to identify strengths and weaknesses in their practice. However, overall, evaluations are not precise enough to enable leaders to pinpoint specific areas to improve. Whole-school attendance has not improved as well as that in similar schools since the time of the pandemic. The attendance of pupils eligible for free school meals is notably lower than the national rate."

Estyn made 3 recommendations: (1) Strengthen the provision for the progressive development of pupils' literacy and numeracy skills so that pupils have meaningful and challenging opportunities to develop these skills and make sufficient progress across the curriculum; (2) Improve attendance and strengthen processes for monitoring whole-school attendance, including that of specific groups of learners; (3) Refine self-evaluation and improvement planning processes so that they focus more precisely on securing improvements in specific areas.

The nearest other state secondary schools to Ysgol John Bright are Ysgol Y Creuddyn (2 miles), Ysgol Aberconwy (2.4 miles) and Eirias High School (4.9 miles).

The nearest railway station is Llandudno Rail Station, about 150 metres away (roughly a 2-minute walk).

19 bus stops are within a five-minute walk; the closest is TA Centre (outside), 50 metres away.