I confess I miss Xenia and her uncompromising views on education! She was actually quite courageous in many views she held but she was very willing to defend them! 
I accept your apology, zero but I still don't quite get why I should use advanced search!
Anyway, it doesn't matter! But I genuinely do feel that the style of education available to hand selected, hyper clever, even 'oddball' DC that suits them down to the ground shouldn't be touted as the blueprint for all other DC's education. There is still quite a lot of choice available to state parents (among which lies 'a scholarship') if the parents are prepared to do the research and even move house and so forth to access it. There was a big debate on here recently about lotteries and fair banding to decide secondary allocation. The somewhat obvious outcome was that those who for whatever reason had failed to secure the school of their choice wanted lotteries; those who'd moved heaven and earth to get their DC into their school of choice wanted to retain that small ability to do so!
Before I'm flamed for 'oddball' I am using the term someone I work closely with did about her WC DC and their mates, only a few days ago!
Back to VA- well, in some ways, I can see that in the same way that Div (i.e. no GCSEs in Eng Lit/History/RE) only works in schools where the Name alone guarantees those DC have already been anointed as being 'above the general morass' thus won't be measured by the same measures that The Rest of Us will be; VA, like BMI, is a useful but limited measure of how a school's bringing its pupils on.
There will absolutely be no doubt quite a few second rate privates that make a show of airily brushing aside vulgar talk such as VA rather than confess either a) they add little to what came before or b) they select clever DC and eject clever DC with a large clutch of high graded GCSEs; which is what many parents want. It's certainly what my DC's state school does, one of many reasons why we chose it (though ours has an oddly high VA to boot I discovered).
Also I believe VA has been messed around with in the same way the Outstanding has been. Once they were maybe a useful measure, where you'd see what was known to be 'a good school' having an Outstanding OFSTED; but now I know of schools with it that frankly no local parent who gives a flying about their DC's education would dream of sending a DC to- the 'measurement tool' is no longer fit-for-purpose.