Making sense of league tables

By Mike Baker
BBC News education correspondent

Have you managed to absorb the detail from this week's league tables for secondary schools in England?

If so, did you decide to judge your local schools on their "raw" results, their "value-added" measure, or on their points score?

We already know it is tough being a parent; but after this year's league tables it seems you need to add another parenting skill to your repertoire: expert data analysis skills to make sense of school rankings.

Parents in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland may be thankful that they were spared this week's data-packed education supplements (although, of course, the tables on this website are much easier to read).

Quick and simple?

I recall that, way back in the days when school performance tables were no more than a gleam in the eye of John Major's "parents' charter", the whole idea was to offer a quick and simple guide to school performance.

Indeed at the time, the then Conservative Education Secretary, Ken Clarke, said something to the effect that he did not want parents to require a PhD to be able to decipher the tables.

Of course, the growing sophistication of the tables springs from the best of intentions: the desire to make them fairer.

Tables based just on simple results often told parents no more than they already knew: that schools which selected only the brightest and most motivated pupils at age 11 achieved the best results at age 15.

They revealed relatively little about the effectiveness of each school's teaching, merely reinforcing what parents already knew about how local schools operated their admissions.

So the "value-added" is a commendable attempt to level the playing field. But what do we learn from this year's findings which, for the first time, give a full "value-added" figure for pupils' improvement from age 11 to 15?

Can tables tell us what is really going on?

Look at the top 10 state schools in the country on this measure and eight of them are comprehensives. The other two are "special" schools, for children with special educational needs.

So a triumph for comprehensive education.

But wait a minute. If you look at a bigger sample, namely those schools achieving the top 25% of "value-added" scores, a different picture emerges.

On this basis, around 30% of the best schools are selective state grammar schools. This is a strong over-representation, considering they make up only around 5% of eligible schools.

So a triumph for academic selection.

But hold on just one more minute. If you have grammar schools, you also have schools which are deprived of the most able children in the area.

Caution

These are still officially called "secondary moderns", although few people under 40 recognise the term any more, and they are strongly under-represented among schools in the top 25% of "value-added" scores.

They are also over-represented among the lowest-scoring schools in the country on "raw" scores.

So we need to be very cautious in trying to draw any general conclusions from the performance tables data.

However, despite this health warning, one pattern does emerge: namely that non-school factors are very powerful in determining children's achievements.

Selective state and independent schools take children from homes which are predominantly middle-class, committed to education and supportive of children.

Cultures

This is a big factor in their success.

Look also at the non-selective schools which have done well at "value-added".

A very high proportion are religious schools. Indeed the top two are Muslim and Sikh respectively. These are cultures which place great value on education.

There is another factor too: gender.

Girls-only schools are much more highly represented in the top "value-added" schools than either mixed or boys-only schools.

Does this mean that teaching is better at girls-only schools or that, in general, girls mature more quickly than boys and therefore progress more rapidly at school? I suspect it is the latter.

None of this will mean that parents are any less likely to look up their local schools in the league tables.

Nor should it. The information is useful even if it is also sometimes misleading.

Local leagues

Indeed, it is particularly useful at a local level because then the results can be placed in the fuller context of school type, admissions criteria and the home background of pupils.

National tables may not be much help to parents who are choosing schools, but local tables are, so long as they are read in conjunction with other information about schools and, ideally, visits to open-days too.

And, although it is can be harsh when the tables highlight under-performers, this is sometimes an essential first-step to improvement.

Last year I visited Ramsgate School in Kent on the day it came bottom in the whole country with just 4% of pupils getting five or more "good" GCSE passes.

This week I went back. The school has raised its score to 15%, the highest score it has ever had. It is confident it will continue to rise in future years.

It was not the league tables alone which forced action, but I suspect they put pressure on the local education authority, Kent, to begin a rescue plan, drafting in an "executive head teacher" from a nearby, successful school.

Highlighting failure can be unfair, and can be counter-productive, but sometimes it is also the shock required to push the authorities into action.

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