In the open

Five years after league tables were introduced, it is time to take stock. Are the effects on the whole good, or bad? Hilary Wilce reports

It's that time of year again - league table time, when national exam results are published and schools are ranked like football teams on their performance. Five years ago, when annual tables were introduced, teachers were up in arms against them. Now the tables are as much a part of the autumn term as harvest festivals and Christmas play rehearsals.

The debate has moved on. Few people now question whether results should be published, although almost everyone in the educational world wants to see that data refined, to show not merely what sort of intake a school has (the main influence on results), but also how well it does with the pupils that come through its doors.

Meanwhile, raw results rule.It is impossible to know from them whether that high scoring school could actually be doing better or that low scoring school is doing brilliantly with the raw material it gets. Schools have had to learn to squeeze what they can from the situation as it is.

The league table culture has everyone in its grip. Pupils complain that teachers are "on their backs all the time" now "these league table things" have come in; faculty heads get a grilling if the results dip down, while heads have become marketing experts as they learn how to make hay with good results, explain away poor ones, and even damp outstanding ones ("a quite exceptional year") lest expectations balloon out of control.

The new culture has a distinctly corporate feel. Schools develop strategies to maximise their output. They set goals, target investment and evaluate performance. Perhaps inevitably, allegations of dirty tricks abound. Intakes are said to be manipulated; ambitious grant maintained schools are accused of decanting marginal pupils into neighbouring comprehensives; exam entrants are steered away from their chosen subjects towards ones where they'll perform best for the school, General Studies is popular, and exam boards are said to tout for trade by offering easier exams than their competitors.

Whether this adds up to healthy competition or a narrow, results-led ruthlessness depends on your point of view - and, probably, your standing in the league table.

"Whatever you say about league tables, they do concentrate your mind on results," says Roger Sparks, head of St Francis Xavier School in Richmond, Yorkshire, which last year was the most improved secondary school in England. "We sat down and analysed our results, where there were strengths and where there were weaknesses." The school began to monitor every student and ensured that those giving cause for concern were kept on track. It introduced twice-weekly staff meetings and redirected resources. The proportion of pupils getting five or more higher-grade GCSEs leapt from 29 per cent to 61 per cent.

"Tables heighten awareness of the need to do well," comments Roger Sparks. "And you can't cover anything up any more. My chair of governors is a senior executive with ICI, very much into systems and results, and he was on my back straight away wanting to know what we were going to put in place to tackle the problem." Like many schools, St Francis Xavier has focused on borderline students who may or may not get the critical C grade at GCSE that is needed to boost the school's league table showing. "In fact, we believe that this group is very often the group that has been left to flounder," says Mr Sparks.

But critics say that this kind of targeting has thrown low achievers to the dogs, citing the growing proportion of 15-year-olds, particularly in the inner cities, leaving school without any qualifications at all.

Others criticise the league tables for sheer irrelevance. "They are totally inappropriate for us," says Joanna Tait, principal of Bishop Auckland College, County Durham, which comes in the low middle of the league. "They make colleges look as if they are doing badly, when in fact they completely exclude all the many thousands of our students who are doing well on vocational and other courses.

"Every time they come out you get this terrible thump in the stomach and you think, `oh God', and then you have to have the same discussions each year explaining to people what they actually mean, and boosting staff morale. I'm totally in favour of publishing results, but not in favour of wasting all this time and energy on results that are not at all useful."

In fact, league table showings are only one part of the new educational scene."They go along with Ofsted inspections and the national curriculum to create a whole climate to do with raising expectations and increasing accountability," according to Geoff Hampton, head of Northicote School, Wolverhampton, deemed by Ofsted to be a "failing" school.

"We set out to establish an achievement culture, publicly recognising attainments and honouring things like punctuality and attendance," says Mr Hampton, who took over the school three years ago. The school increased liaison with parents, increased teacher assessment and monitored students, with the result that exam results jumped from 8 per cent of pupils getting five higher grade GCSE in 1994, to 23 per cent in 1995. The school was taken off the "failing" list last year.

Such turnarounds put intense pressure on teachers. "We discuss our exam results very openly at the start of the year and while I'm obviously saying a lot of `well dones' to staff, there are always cases where we have to sit down and set clear targets," says Mr Hampton.

No one feels performance pressure more than heads, who have to carry the can for poor results. The National Association of Head Teachers claims that the number of its members sacked or forced to take early retirement has doubled in two years, while independent schools have seen a sharp increase in senior heads quitting early. The pressures were exemplified by the dismissal of the head of Cheltenham College, Peter Wilkes, after the school slumped in an A-level table, and his wife's subsequent denouncement of governing bodies "for putting intolerable pressure on heads to raise academic standards".

Her husband, she said, cared as much about the achievements of his less able students as those who appeared in the league tables.

The ultimate question, though, is whether league tables boost standards.Results have risen steadily since they were brought in. "But improvements in performance actually started back in the Seventies, well before league tables were introduced," says David Jesson of York University's Centre for Performance Evaluation and Resource Management, who suspects the rise is more to do with the calm after the educational upheavals of the late Eighties.

The largest increases in pupil performance came in the years after the introduction of GCSE in 1988, he points out, followed by another blip after league tables were introduced, when schools immediately put more pupils in for more GCSE subjects.

And while the tables can throw the spotlight on spectacular short-term success stories, research by Jesson and John Gray of Homerton College shows that only about 10 per cent of schools show significant, sustained improvement.

League tables neither identify excellence, nor flush out under-performance, Jesson says; they may in fact do the opposite, masking good work in low- achieving schools and failing to reveal inadequacies within schools that have high-calibre intakes.

Schools wanting to make real improvements need to look beyond the cul- de-sac of league tables to the detailed work on how to "add value" to the progress of all pupils through all schools, now being pioneered by Shropshire, and some other local authorities," he says n

In league table terms - as in others - Stratford School, a grant maintained school in east London, has known the best of times and the worst of times.

In 1993, only 4 per cent of pupils achieved five or more higher grades at GCSE. Ofsted deemed it a "failing" school. Two years later 28 per cent of pupils achieved that level and the school was applauded as one of the most improved in the country. Behind the figures lies a long saga of deep financial, political and educational problems, followed by intensive planning, staff development, monitoring and review.

The school has put all staff, right down to dinner ladies, through training, worked closely with parents, looked in detail at what goes on in classrooms, and targeted specific areas for improvement.

Today pupil numbers are up from 190 to 650, and the school is welcoming and orderly, with smartly turned out pupils and every class working attentively.

This year its league table results have stayed steady, with 27.2 per cent of pupils achieving the benchmark level, but the school points out that the exam group was larger than the year before, with a greater proportion of boys, who tend to perform less well at GCSE than girls.

The head, Anne Snelling, is philosophical about the ups and downs of the performance league. "If your school is labelled publicly as a failing school, then you need to be able to demonstrate improvement by national standards. And however biased the tables are, however incomplete, they do give you a view.

"Of course they have faults, they're not an accurate picture of achievement, but it's a real world out there and people don't compete on a level playing field.

"It might not be fair that schools like ours have to compete with schools in the leafy suburbs, but I work from the principle that my youngsters are as good as youngsters anywhere and are entitled to the best"n

Croydon's GSCE results are moving up, after a borough-wide push for improvement in academic standards among its 11 local education authority schools. This year 32.5 per cent of pupils gained five or more higher grade passes, an increase of 2.5 per cent on 1995.

The national average of pupils getting five or more good GCSEs is 43.5 per cent, but Croydon's local authority run schools are up against competition for pupils from local grant maintained schools, and from grammar schools in neighbouring boroughs.

"Croydon has been collecting data for a long time, but this hadn't been related adequately to national standards," says the deputy council leader, Valerie Shawcross. "It was in real difficulties. Its results weren't rising as fast as other boroughs ... league tables were a useful piece of management information."

In 1994 the incoming Labour administration set up a broad-based school improvement working party, chaired by former chief HMI Eric Bolton, which looked at a range of targets and changes. "It was about leadership, getting a buzz going, getting a sense of what was possible," says Ms Shawcross.

"In schools we felt a real change of atmosphere," says Ian Wilson, head of Woodcote high school. "Until then, we had tended to feel held to account, without any help or suggestions of how to improve."

This year his results have leapt up by 10 per cent, with 58.8 per cent of pupils gaining five or more higher-grade GCSEs. The school has looked closely at pupil potential and monitored underachievers. It has laid on additional revision classes and encouraged more parental involvement.

Mr Wilson chairs a Croydon school improvement network, where heads meet to share ideas. "People tend to be frightened to get into school improvement, they think it's something huge. But what has come out of the network is that every school can do something ... You have to think big and start small"