School with 70% pass rate "actually" has 0% - have you seen this?

[roisin]

BBC article here

"In one academy, 70% of pupils got five good GCSEs, but this reduced to zero when equivalents were discounted."

So what they are saying is that EVERY child in that Academy is doing one of these inflated "worth 2, 4, 6" courses, eg COPE; presumably purely to try and manipulate the league tables. But actually NONE of the students are leaving with a handful of decent qualifications?!

I wonder where this school is?

So are we agreed that 'VA' scores for super selective schools are a bit of a red herring, then?!

I just wanted to weigh in and agree with what banter said earlier- that League table positions, E. Bacc scores, GCSEs, equivalents etc etc are all entirely dependent - and really only have meaning- within the context of where the school is placed geographically, and therefore socially. For all the ranting about how much 'integrity' Gove is showing, and how 'this will ensure all our DCs get a good education', (though what we seem to mean is 'OK, now every child will sit 5 GCSEs: Maths, Eng, MFL + 2 randomly selected humanities, so that's OK, then. Even if they stand precious little chance of passing any of them...)- the reality is that every one of us who has ever glanced at a league table has contributed to the weirdly oddly skewed 'attainment measurement' system we have.

Though I don't condone, I cannot blame schools that have 'played' the game because politics is a game and schools are being judged nationally about how well they play that game. An entire school's output (of all types), ethos, enhancement, commitment to all its pupils and so on can now be summed up in one word, be it 'Satisfactory', 'Outstanding' or whatever.

I think league tables are just a stupid and useless waste of time. I think we should set up league tables of politicians in which we distil various sorts of scores on different measures into a single rating and publish these in all the newspapers.

Let's see whether they still think this is a good idea, then.

An educational researcher recently said that, once all other factors were controlled for, the effect of a school on a child's educational attainment was about 10%. What a lot of parental angst over such a small effect.