4/29/2008 8:36:00 AM
Martin Stephen: Daily Telegraph 29 April
The Daily Telegraph invented league tables. As the story has it, John Clare, the paper's education editor at the time, had been in the company of two independent school heads who had bragged non-stop about the academic excellence of their respective schools.In the long, hot and news-empty days of August, and being suspicious of these claims, he decided to call their bluff, and did the unprecedented thing - of actually asking leading independent schools what their A-level results were. After which, there was more egg flying around than might be found in a sandwich factory.There was also considerable shock and horror both at who was in that first league table and, even more important, who was not.Admittedly, those early league tables did do some good in banishing complacency and unjustified bragging. But now, a decade and a half on, they have become a monster, eating away at some of the best things in education.It is for this reason that my school, St Paul's, London, will not be submitting its A-level or GCSE results to ISC (the Independent Schools Council) this August.This means that for the first time in a decade and a half our results will not appear in the Telegraph league table (this despite the fact that this paper's table does the best of a bad job and carries more weight still than any other). Alas, we have no power to withdraw from the separate, government league tables produced by Whitehall in January. DT
Independent/ Private Sector
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