I appreciate, we are fortunate. We are to able to choose to move to where a good school is, other considerations permitting. And, yes, who wouldn't prefer great local schooling of equally good standards no matter where you are in the country, whilst at the same time seeing innovations in each school and a mechanism by which these ideas and successes are shared between them?
I am concerned that hiding league tables hinders parents from knowing how their school is doing comparatively, especially if you don't have local knowledge.. It prevents them from making an informed choice.
I agree that exam results are not the all encompassing measure, but I'd be inclined to believe that a school with good exam results, manages other things like behaviour and attendance better than others, especially if you can see snapshots of exam results over time to get a more balance picture and which would encompass how a school has improved. It is no longer easy to see anywhere, at a glance, the key, if not all-encompassing measure of comparative exam results, least of all over time. You have to go to a report for a particular school to see it's own results.  Or depend on the subjective view of fallible inspectors with their own political biases is just not the same thing. Parents for obvious reasons know only really about their own school, and nobody is going to want to say they're sending to a bad school. Recently, someone told that the Grammar school in Perth was now the best, which is simply false by reputation and by comparing results with the Academy and High School.
If the SED, with the enthusiastic collaboration of local education authorities is doing this to try to create a level playing field for laudable reasons, that's great. More cynically you might say they're making education easier to administer because they don't want the problem of good schools being over-subscribed and the criticism and problems of amelioration they would have dealing with what are plain to see are bad schools. So they hide the facts by making it difficult to compare.Â
What this actually means is that all schools are dragged down, do not compete, are not inspired by great schools and their success is left to the commitment of individual teachers. The ones I've met are increasingly disillusioned, stressed, overworked and bogged down in bureaucracy.  It improves ease of administration at the cost of driving down school quality, turning education into lowest common denominator education. This is anti-majoritarian thinking at its worst, political correctness gone mad. I think catering for the least able and most vulnerable is the mark of a civilized society, but not at the expense of the education of the majority. And what of the most able?
There could be great schools people were proud of and improving schools that people knew about and attention, resource and support focused on them. If there was ever a case of masking a problem, brushing it under the carpet and destroying a country's potential this is it.
It turns parents and children, a whole generation, into passive, docile consumers, content with their lot and who do what they're told by those who're in charge. It reinforces that disease of narrow minded parochialism that I was warned about, the one deep-rooted for generations in the psyche of a lack of self-esteem, of inferiority, of hating those who go against the grain and who strive to improve their lot.Â
It's clear, local authorities don't want parents to be able to have a choice of school at all. They let you have a choice of hospital care however. Where is the consistency?  Look at it in the wider picture where the voice of Community Councils is being silenced, their power was stripped long ago. The end result is an administration which is happy for people to say what they like, but have no effective power, and who can change the status quo not at all. Doesn't this fly in the face of what democracy and democratic choice is about? Funnily enough, I heard an Egyptian say on the radio that that right to criticise but powerlessness was what is was like under Mubbarek.
Believe me, I intend no ad hominem criticism, I just don't understand why parents and schools seem to so happily to accept not knowing how their school is doing in comparison to others. Clearly, some schools will be better than others. Doesn't anyone want to know which these are, why this is, how this is and how schools can learn from the successes of others?
Perplexedly,
Red Welly.
