league table lies

[coldrain2018]

Due to frustration reading posts from people that believe league tables are a genuine indicator of the quality of the school, I'm starting a list of ways they lie.

I have got many examples, but its late, and I'm tired, so I'll only do a few tonight, and will come back tomorrow.

if anyone wants to add their lies, please feel free

The problem is that most people don't use the data as a starting point -they see it as the be all and end all.

My brother's children go to a school where 95% achieved 5 or more GCSEs at Level 4 or above (including Maths and English).

The school where my children go achieved 62% for the same.

I consider my mother to be an educated intelligent person, and yet the other week I had a very long conversation with her where she simply refused to believe that, on this statistic alone, my brother's children's school wasn't much better.

My reasoning would be

1. Brother's DC school is selective and takes top 15% only. 95% pass rate is actually quite low for this sort of school. But ... I wonder if external factors (illness, family issues) affected the other 5%? If this is the case, then the school has my respect for not entering them as external candidates to improve their figures.

1. DC's school is genuinely comprehensive with 30/50/20% high/medium/low achievers. 62% means a highish proportion of the medium achievers are getting 5 passes.

... but most people don't remotely start thinking like that.

A bit like the way that many parents apply to Ofsted outstanding schools automatically - assuming they must be "best".

Teen people don’t generally drill down into statistics, the general population barely understand them. Progress 8 was decided upon because it’s a single number and parents wouldn’t understand anything more complex, and they still prefer the headline figure of maths and English because a pass rate is something concrete that they do understand. Kids failing = bad, kids passing = good.

OK. So we shouldn't publish data because people won't use it correctly? That's pretty depressing isn't it?

I agree though that many people don't. You just have to look at some threads on the Secondary board. And those are from people who care enough to come onto MN and find out / post about things.

So what's the answer?
No statistics at all?
Data available to parents who ask for it?
Available on a DofE website but not on school sites?
Compulsory statistics teaching along with ante-natal classes?

I don’t know, it’s a mess. The data tail is wagging the education dog. Look at what happened when ebacc figures started being published and then prioritised in progress 8 buckets - art, music, technology sidelined or dropped from the curriculum. And most people don’t even care about ebacc!

Lots of people think that more able mathematicians should be offered further maths GCSE. It now no longer counts in the league tables at all, not even in the ‘other’ bucket. Guess what’s happening in schools?

Schools which simply exclude pupils from their data publication - so which have bigger cohorts, but I the league tables, only report on a smaller cohort - of course it's those with a number of less desirable grades who get excluded from the figures they express. They might justify it as those were not standard students and they they only include standard students on standard course patterns - so justify not including data from someone taking only 2 instead of 3 A levels (3 norm) or someone who sat over 3 years (2 years norm) or someone with very poor attendance due to illness or lots of outside school commitments (good attendance norm).

Problem is that for many of the League tables. When the data is requested, there isn't a clear definition of what/who should be included.

And I agree, League tables are high stakes and for those near the top, the fear of dropping a couple of % points which might result in a drop of 20 or more places just cannot be entertained as an option. Therefore, I'd think more and more schools are very selective with what they actually include, making it all a nonsense. Perverse incentives eh!

We have a large number of international pupils and the school always enters them for their home language GCSE. This boosts the A* grades for the school by a considerable amount.

There’s a lot to be said for compulsory statistics courses! It would be a bit of a lead balloon if presented like that but wider education on how to interpret data would benefit many. Being able to spot when a school (or doctor, or company...) has cherry picked a piece of information is a start. I’ve seen a few schools picking a different stat each year!

I meant to add that listening to More or Less on radio 4 is not a bad place to start learning core skills on how to see through the crap, especially from politicians or head teachers. I tell sixth formers interested in data science to do that but it is quite accessible and builds sceptical skills.

One of the most depressing aspects of this is the disproportionate impact on vulnerable young people from struggling families.

Child’s attendance drops in Y9 - often because they are young carers, from single parent families where mum (and it usually is mum) suffers from a range of MH problems. They are looking after mum and younger siblings and depressed themselves. School engages and tries to boost attendance but fails.
By Y10 school is worried that child’s poor attendance will impact on performance stats and suggests to mum that they will prosecute for non attendance OR mum can excercise her right to “home school”.
Mum jumps at the chance and the child is off loaded with minimal LEA supervision. Stays at home and gets more depressed. Never really makes it back into education because two years sitting in a dismal home on youtube does not provide the right springboard. No qualifications, no job, no self confidence, no future.

Schools and LEAs should have these “ parent decided to home ed and child did not sit any exams” stats as a performance indicator. Now THAT would provide some fascinating stats.

If people cannot read statistics, that is NOT a reason to stop publishing them.

If parents are dumb enough to choose a school based solely on stats, more fool them.

It is only with good use of the published statistics that the "games" have been exposed.
Long may it continue.

I was at school long before league tables.
My private school merrily took the cash and did not deliver the service.
Those days are gone.

Selective schools now have to prove that they add value over and above selection
so far with a spectacular lack of success

League tables are overall a force for good
so long as those making policy decisions have an understanding of their limitations
Yes Gove, not all pupils can be "above average"

On that last crossed-out bit - it triggered me to find the original parliamentary discussion between Gove and the Ed Cttee:

Q98 Chair: One is: if "good" requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?

Michael Gove: By getting better all the time.

Q99 Chair: So it is possible, is it?

Michael Gove: It is possible to get better all the time.

Q100 Chair: Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?

Michael Gove: I cannot remember.

Glad I cheered you up

My favourite ridiculous comment was Tony Blair's that he wanted 75% of pupils to be above average.
Thoughts:
Median-not possible, it's always going to be 50%
Mode-possible, but then you have the most common result at 25% which can't be desirable.
Mean-well, the only way this could be achieved is by the bottom 25% failing significantly worse than the top 75% are achieving. Surely he couldn't mean that?

I was at a school in the 6th form that set a lot of score by league tables. It left me very sceptical. Things I saw: People told to stop an A-level that they wouldn't get a high enough mark in it. People managed out (some lowish achievers found they were suddenly expelled for... having too long hair. Whereas the pair of high achievers that were found dealing drugs to the younger pupils were told to go away and think about it), People not allowed to try if they weren't certain they'd get a good result, no help for people if they were struggling (on the basis they'd give up totally), the person who got an accountancy apprenticeship (for which he was very suited to) put under huge pressure to go to university because they wanted as high a %age as possible. And my personal favourite: The list of 6th form leavers' destinations. They encouraged very heavily Oxford Brooks (Oxford Polytechnic until when I was at school) and the equivalent Cambridge.
So there were a number going there. Listed as: Oxford University; Brooks College.
Then they "accidentally" counted them in the Oxbridge successes.

witchend
when did Blair say that ?

He said many dumb things, but I do not remember that one

It was somewhere between September 1998 and June 2000 because I remember where I was living when I heard it.
I don't think it was in a speech, more a "heated exchange" in the commons. It stuck in my mind in the way things do when they're so obviously not thought through. It was in a clip, possibly of PM question time, on R4.