Dawlish News

Headteachers today condemned the latest expansion of Government school league tables to cover results achieved by 14-year-olds as an “unnecessary irrelevance”.

School standards minister David Miliband said that, for too long, too many pupils had “drifted” in the first three years of secondary school and publishing the results highlighted the work schools were doing to improve their performance.

But both the National Association of Head Teachers and the Secondary Heads Association said parents could find out how their children’s schools were doing without the need for creating “flawed, misleading and unnecessary” tables.

Nationally, the proportion of 14-year-olds who reached the required standard in English rose 2% to 69% this year.

In maths, the proportion was up 4% to 71% and in science it ticked up 1% to 68%, figures published earlier in the year by the Department for Education and Skills showed.

As well as the so-called “raw score” tables, the Government published a “value-added” measure for each secondary school in England, showing how much - or how little - progress they helped their pupils to make in the past three years.

A score of around 100 indicated average progress. If a school scored lower than 100, it was likely the pupils made below-average progress. Scores above 100 indicated above-average progress.

Mr Miliband said: “The early years in secondary school are crucial but they have long been the years when many pupils have drifted.”

Today’s tables were based on the results achieved by the first year group of children to be affected by the extension of the primary school drive to improve the three Rs to comprehensives.

”It is very encouraging that our strategy to deal with this is beginning to deliver results,” Mr Miliband added. "It is also vital we have the best possible picture of how pupils are doing. Including value-added information helps to do this, showing the progress that each school helps its pupils make between 11 and 14 in different schools.”

NAHT general secretary David Hart said: “Performance tables are an unnecessary irrelevance. They serve no useful purpose when the tests themselves are of a totally different order to GCSEs or A-Levels.

”The publication of yet another set of performance tables is totally at odds with the Government’s express desire to cut the number of public service accountability measures. When will the Government learn that introducing misleading performance measures will not improve standards?

”The value-added model used by the Department for Education and Skills is flawed in its attempt to compare performance at 11 with performance at 14.”

SHA general secretary John Dunford said: “Secondary heads reject league tables of Key Stage 3 results as flawed, misleading and unnecessary.

”The league tables present a spurious rank order of schools, when the statistics on which they are based cannot sustain such detailed comparisons.

”Key stage 3 tests are no more than a staging post on the way to the more important GCSE, A-Level and vocational examinations at 16 and beyond. As such, today’s tables add yet another layer to the accountability of schools.

”Parents can be given this information, together with national statistical comparisons, without putting the scores into the form of league tables, which shed very little light on the true performance of schools.”

Eamonn O’Kane, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: “League tables place schools under unacceptable pressure, cause teachers to teach to tests and undermine their confidence in their own professional judgement.

”NASUWT will continue to press the Government to abandon league tables and replace them with a more appropriate and effective method of accountability.

”Even with the addition of limited value-added information, the tables fail to reflect the real achievements of schools in challenging circumstances.

”In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, league tables have been rejected because they have not been viewed as particularly helpful and their sole effect has been to demoralise hard-working schools and teachers.”

Shadow health and education secretary Tim Yeo said: "These results show that the very schools Labour has been undermining for thirty years continue to perform outstandingly well. Crucially these schools do best at raising the performance of all levels of pupils regardless of their ability.

"We are determined that not a single grammar school will close. Furthermore, restrictions of schools' freedom to decide their own admissions criteria may well count against the pupils Tony Blair claims he is so concerned about."