Education Letter: Turning the tables

Your Views

IT IS sad that someone as informed as Peter Mortimore should omit, as Roy Hattersley did a fortnight since, a key weakness of the "spurious league tables".

They feed the popular misconceptions of "good" and "poor" schools because they don't show the highest performance achieved by pupils in a particular school; they merely aggregate results.

If it were made clear that many schools do achieve the highest standards with their more able pupils, it might make a difference to the continuing brain drain in favour of schools which bask in undeserved reputations. It would certainly make a difference to teacher morale.

CHRIS JOHNSON

Bradford