Schools Guide

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In our youth, for many of us, a league table was something that was inhabited by our favourite football team and each weekend we would look at where we were positioned, who was on the way up who faced relegation, and so on. In fact, the Sunday-morning papers with the football leagues had their musical counterpart on Sunday evenings when the weekly chart was announced: the risers, the fallers and the weekly teatime anticipation of who would be number one.

Now there seem to be league tables for almost everything. At Christmas (the slowest news time of year) our papers are full of lists, charts and tables, and the television schedules are bolstered with programmes listing the top 50 favourite this and that. It is no surprise, therefore, that schools have been the subject of leagues tables for some time. The idea of comparing schools using some type of league table is probably here to stay in one form or another, even if educators, national authorities, the media and schools themselves criticise tables, and some private schools chose to boycott them altogether.

Given that choosing a school can present families with a bewildering decision, parents quite rightly want to consult a range of sources before signing up to a particular type of education. League tables are a good starting point but unfortunately any one school is likely to appear in different positions in different tables, depending on the criteria. A football league table, or the Radio 1 chart, is based on only one criteria because this is the only one that matters. If your team scores more goals or an artist sells more singles, then they go up. If they don’t, then they go down. If we are going to measure schools, we have to decide on how we will position them, and this is where the whole matter gets complicated.

Exams should be a simple enough starting place … but they are not. We can measure easily GCSE passes from A* to C, but a particular table might or might not include passes in English and mathematics. It might also include GCSE equivalents, courses such as BTEC First Diplomas and National Vocational Qualifications, so the position in the table will not show if the school has a good track record in more demanding academic subjects, even if it ranks highly. To make matters more complex the latest GCSEs results table produced by the government has excluded the new IGCSE (International General Certificate in Education) and because the IGCSE was not recognised by the government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) pupils who take IGCSEs are classed either as not having taken these subjects or to have failed them. In one extreme example from January 2009 only 1% of children at a highly regarded academic private school where the IGCSE is taken were recorded as having achieved five A–C grades at GCSE, including maths and English, whereas the actual proportion was 98%. Hence it is at the bottom of one table but almost at the top of another. The new regulator, the Office of the Qualifications and Examinations (Ofqual), will be reconsidering this issue.

The A-level league tables are no more straightforward. As with GCSE, while all local authorities in England publish the passes from each school at A-level this is not so in Scotland or Wales, and the table does not include private schools or passes in the International Baccalaureate (IB). The IB requires detailed academic study of a wide range of subjects, including languages, the arts, science, maths, history and geography, and leads to a single qualification. It is quickly gaining in popularity in many independent schools. It is also highly regarded as a sixth-form qualification by university admission departments but it does not appear in any tables alongside A-levels (although there are now some ‘unofficial’ IB league tables to be found). The even newer pre-U examination, described by the examination board promoting it as ‘an exciting new post-16 qualification. It prepares students with the skills and knowledge they need to make a success of their subsequent studies at university’, is also growing in popularity as an alternative to Alevels. It, too, has no place in league tables.

League tables in their many, various manifestations published by government or the national media, will give families some information about schools and the state of education at that time but they are quite simplistic as a way of describing a whole school. They are best used as one of a series of factors in making a decision and, like the music charts or football leagues, the one certainty is that they will always change.

Thinking about league tables:
some guidelines

• Consider how the school has performed over a longer period, perhaps five years.

• Read carefully about the way the table has been created and how each school is positioned (which examinations are included and which excluded).

• Find out if the school you are interested in has decided to remove itself from a table. Some highly respected and high-achieving independent schools refuse to provide data for tables as they do not want to be involved in such matters.

• Find out if the school is selective on entry. Such schools should have a higher position than those that are non-selective.

• Find out if the school is a specialist school (such as a music school) where the pupils may take fewer subjects.

• Find out the school’s admission policy for children who have learning difficulties. This too may have some impact.

• Bear in mind that, just because the school may have a high position in a table, this is only an indicator of current performance and your children may not sit the exams in the A-level table for another seven years.

• Find out what is provided in the extracurricular programme. These additional skills are vital in an all-round education and may be more important to the happiness of the child (and open up a pathway to higher achievement) than the academic prowess of the school.