Exam league tables 'must be scrapped'

The days of the controversial individual school exam league tables are over, a headteachers' leader says today.

Writing exclusively for The Independent, John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, says they must be scrapped if plans for heads to take over responsibility for running groups of schools are to succeed.

"A government that encourages greater collaboration between institutions cannot simultaneously publish league tables of individual performance that set school against school," he says. "No longer must we have to endure the contradictions of officially produced league tables which produce perverse incentives for schools to improve at the expense of their neighbours."

In a speech last week, Estelle Morris, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, announced plans for groups of schools to cluster together under one head and one governing body.

Mr Dunford argues that for the scheme to succeed schools will have to move away from the "culture of competition" imposed since the previous Conservative government introduced league tables. It is "draining school resources and headteachers' energy in marketing ploys", he says.

Instead, a new system of "value-added" tables showing how communities or groups of schools had improved the performance of all their pupils should be introduced.

"At the present time, league tables act as an incentive to schools to enhance their reputation by changing their admissions policies to favour applications from more intelligent children," he says.

"They encourage schools to exclude poorly performing pupils who later appear in the list of examination results of another school. They depress the position of schools that are particularly good at educating children with special needs.

"If performance information related to groups of schools, all these perverse incentives would be removed at a stroke, because it would be in the interests of every school in the group for all the local schools to perform well. In their current form, league tables will act as a major impediment to change and must be abolished altogether or re-cast in a way that encourages collaboration."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "Federated schools will raise standards by sharing more widely the leadership of our best heads and middle managers and the expertise of high quality staff. But performance tables give vital information to parents and increase accountability. We have no intention of taking that information away from parents."

* The school of the future will resemble a plush office block in which students work on computers in a paperless and bookless environment, according to a video released by the Department for Education and Skills yesterday. Even the humble blackboard will be replaced by a giant "blueboard" on which the teacher can summon information from the internet to liven up dull lessons.