A grouping of head teachers, supported by some educational management groups, has decided to set up its own league tables, which they believe will more accurately indicate to parents the merits of secondary schools. This may be a good idea; equally it may be a bad and confusing one.
The critical issue, upon which front line judgement of any school must depend, is the academic (or vocational) outcome it achieves for students. In a global world where talent can readily be imported, the UK cannot prosper unless these outcomes are in the very top echelon. Young people who are not provided with the knowledge and skills to shine in some part of the workforce will drift through a life of hardship and indifference, bedeviled with benefit dependency, drugs and crime. Any league table which disguises academic mediocrity within a package of alluring extras will do more harm than good.
Equally important is the measure of what the school is able to add in terms of value to young lives already burdened by disadvantage, including poverty and parental indifference. A school which can offer the hope of escape through knowledge is one far more valuable than another which caters only for the cleverest children from the most advantaged backgrounds, with the most engaged parents.
It is also important that education delivers a more diverse outcome and that this spreads out into public life. We are creating too few engineers and scientists and far too many lawyers. The latter then move into politics to create more laws, thus ensuring vast national resources are channeled into a profession already bloated and overbearing. We also need to explore greater diversity in the background and achievements in those whom we elect to public office or employ in the civil service. There have been far too many failures in public policy over the last twenty five years, especially in economics and foreign affairs, from cabinets and a civil service dominated at the top by the Oxbridge model, for it any longer to be judged uniquely fit for purpose.
If the new tables address these issues well and good. If not they will simply serve to disguise and confuse.