MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - Nov. 7, 2015) - Across Quebec, 47 secondary schools showed significant improvement in their academic performance over the past five years, according to the Fraser Institute's annual school rankings released today.

The Report Card on Quebec's Secondary Schools 2015 ranks 454 public, private, Francophone and Anglophone schools based largely on the results from provincewide tests in French, English, science, mathematics and history.

"Parents have repeatedly shown they value the ability to track the performance of their child's school and compare it to other schools. In addition, our report card allows them to quickly and easily determine if their child's school is improving or worsening academically," said Peter Cowley, Fraser Institute director of school performance studies.

Among the improvers are schools from private and public, Anglophone and Francophone sectors, located in rural towns and big cities, and serving students with differing challenges.

For example, the fastest improving school in the province- based on analysis of its results over the most recent four school years - is Vallée-des-Lacs - a public, francophone school located in a small eastern Quebec community. The school's overall rating has steadily improved to 8.0 (out of 10) in 2014 from 2.7 in 2010.

Another school which showed marked improvement was Longueuil's L'Agora. Despite more than 40 per cent of its secondary class having special needs, L'Agora students earned a score of 4.9 in 2014 - more than triple its rating five years earlier.

"It doesn't matter where a school is located or what obstacles its students face, the results consistently show that improvement is possible," Cowley said.

The data in the report card also allows for comparisons of the different types of schools.

• 86 per cent of the schools among the top 100 ranked schools are private schools (even though 72 per cent of all schools in the report card are public schools);

• On average, private schools achieved a rating of 7.8 while public schools averaged just 5.4 out of 10.

• Of the 47 schools that have shown significant improvement, 34 are public and 13 are private.

Detailed results of all 454 schools can be found at www.compareschoolrankings.org.

Visitors to the site can quickly and easily see how a school is doing over the past five years on any of the nine indicators of academic performance as well as the overall rating. Comparisons among schools are also easily made.

The complete Report Card on Quebec's Secondary Schools 2015, is also available as a free pdf.

Peter Cowley, author of the Report Card, is available for English-Language telephone and studio interviews from Vancouver.

Fastest improving schools in the report card:

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The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal and ties to a global network of think-tanks in 87 countries. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for Canadians, their families and future generations by studying, measuring and broadly communicating the effects of government policies, entrepreneurship and choice on their well-being. To protect the Institute's independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research. Visit www.fraserinstitute.org