School league tables - what do they mean?

Every August teachers up and down the land flick through the newspaper searching for the school league tables, which is based upon the average points score of a student in their exams. If you are unaware, each examined subject has a number of points assigned to it based upon what grade a student achieves. Maths and English get more points as they are perceived as being more important. Schools are then placed in order from the highest average points scoring schools to the lowest.

In my view this is totally unfair – different schools have different intakes and it is therefore extremely hard to directly compare them. You wouldn’t expect a school set in an area of high unemployment to perform the same as a school set in a leafy, middle class suburb. Attitudes towards education can be wildly different in different neighbourhoods based upon upbringing and prospects.

I can see how they could be useful to compare schools that should be of a similar standard, for example private schools. If you are going to fork out thousands of pounds on your child’s education, you need to ensure that your money is being spent wisely, and that the school has a good track record with other students’ grades.

However, the league tables are just a stick with which to bash a school, whether it be the senior staff of the teaching staff being bashed. Within a town the results have some benefit. In the town I teach there are a number of secondary schools and we are all going to have a similar academic standard of intake. As a parent I can therefore see some use in the league tables when choosing which secondary school to apply for.

Countrywide however the practise is of little or no use. The same schools appear at the top each year, and they are selective with regards academic ability, so of course they are going to get a high average points score when all their students have been chosen for their academic ability. They don’t have students who don’t achieve high grades.

League tables are also constantly being manipulated by schools. There are courses that are supposedly equivalent to 4 GCSEs that entail exclusively coursework. These are historically “easier” for students who might not achieve a C grade in GCSEs to achieve a “Pass” in one of these. You can’t blame the schools, they are just utilising a loophole in the system, but the moral of the story is: “Don’t believe everything you read in the league tables”.

The problem for schools is that people do believe everything they read in the league tables, so schools are forced to send students down academic paths that will get them the highest grades rather than an academic path that they might enjoy and eventually take further, onto further education or university.

League tables force schools to focus purely on results and ignore the enjoyable side of education, which in the long run means that people are scarred by their school experience rather than enthused by it. The knock-on effect to future generations’ attitude towards education could be irreversible as they are pressured into covering a curriculum and not getting their teeth into the subject to develop a passion for it.