School league tables do not help

When I read the Helena Lachartre interview Bring in School League Tables (Connexion May 2008), as a former teacher, my heart sank.

Over thirty years ago there was a great deal of concern about English education and rightly so. But the short sighted response was to test anything that moved, and make education into a competition.

As a result, schools began to “teach to the test” and league tables were introduced as a way of “encouraging schools to do better.”

League tables do not encourage anybody - they threaten and there is no hard evidence that any progress that has been made in the UK is due to league tables.

In the frantic pursuit of higher grade averages and better league table positions, British schools have persuaded students to take courses unsuitable to their talents and wishes, severely delaying or arresting future success.

Some have also refused to accept their own students into their sixth form courses, because they only achieved a B+ instead of an A, wrecking self-confidence in many cases. League tables are simplistic, imprecise, misleading and like smoking, can damage your health.

So Madame Lachartre should continue to promote league tables if she wants an education system that encourages schools to think more about the competition with each other and less about the needs of the students in their care.

She should promote league tables if she wants an education that forces everybody through the same academic hoops, in spite of individual and community differences.

She should promote league tables if she wants an education system in which statistics, however misleading, are more important than students and their teachers. She should remember: “You don't fatten the pig by measuring it.”

If there is a problem in French education, then it should be tackled at source.
Teachers just want to see young people progress and succeed. Parents want exactly the same. They can and should be partners and allies. Parent associations and teacher associations should be talking to each other about just exactly what they want from education in the next fifty years and how it is going to be achieved.

Parents and teachers are the people who have the children's best interests in mind.
Politicians are the last people who are able to say what is needed in schools.
Parents and teachers together are the key to any effective education system.
Mike Todd
Saone et Loire