The Top 100 State Secondary Schools

The Sunday Times this week has four lists:

• The Top 100 Independent Secondary Schools.
• The Top 100 Prep Schools (Independent Primary Schools to you and me).
• The Top 100 State Primary Schools.
• The Top 100 State Secondary Schools.

There will be parents across the land scouring the list to see if a school near to where they live is featured, particularly in the state sector. The trouble is that the state lists ought to come with a "health warning".

What do I mean by that?
It means that the table is not really showing what most people will expect it to show, and that is a true comparison of all state schools around the country.

The secondary list is not a level playing field, and just a quick glance at the names of the schools will tell you that. The word "comprehensive" doesn't feature at all, but the word "grammar" features in well over half the list; interestingly the word "academy", the flagship of recent governements only appears once, and not until number 89. This means that most, if not all the schools in that top 100 are heavily selective of the children who join their ranks through the 11+ exams. They are essentially independent schools without the fees, where the 11+ exam replaces the common entrance (the exams children sit to qualify for independent school).

Many state secondary secondary schools don't have the "luxury" of selection, they are known as "comprehensive schools", doing exactly what they say on the tin by offering a comprehensive education for the whole community. Grammar schools don't exist in many parts of the country, so schools in those areas don't feature in the list at all, unsurprisingly. I teach in one of the many areas that doesn't have the grammar system, and to be honest I'm not totally against the system, but that's another post altogether, which now the seed has been planted, will happen fairly shortly.

All that tables like these do is demoralise those who don't work in the schools featured in the lists. They make you feel inadequate even though you have little or no hope of actually competing. The teaching profession is already plumbing a morale trough with the pensions debate and various other policy issues and biased articles like this only deepen the gloom.

Why can't the media and politicains/education agencies actually tell the truth about school?. A more accurate league table would be one that shows what is known as "value added" data, i.e. schools that improve a child's grades the most during their time at the school. This would allow all secondary schools to have a chance to appear on the list rather than just the privileged few.

But that would make sense of course.