What are league tables?

What are league tables?

Ralph Lucas (Editor, The Good Schools Guide) gives expert video advice on: Where can I get a copy of a school's exam results?; Where can I get a copy of the school's OFSTED report?; What are league tables? and more...

The government produces league tables of data on schools every year. They are then picked up by newspapers and turned into tables ranked by performance on some particular criteria: the percentage of getting 5 A-C's on GCSE, the points of their A-Level, whatever the newspaper likes, and that will produce a ranking. It's not something to take too seriously. Schools at the top are often good schools, schools right at the bottom are often bad ones. But The Good Schools Guide has schools that are enormously low in the tables because, for instance, they are Steiner Schools, and they don't bother taking A-Levels until the children are eighteen. Therefore, they will tend to fall outside the scope of the tables, so you get things which are totally distorted. It's an interesting statistic, but don't pay too much attention to it.