Headmaster blasts league tables

The Headmaster of Rossall School is slamming the latest GCSE league tables as misleading and says Mums and Dads will get the wrong impression of standards at the school.

The figures rank local schools according to how well pupils performed in the exams.

However, it fails to include the exams actually studied by many students at Rossall.

Dr Stephen Winkley said: "The inclusion of the IGCSE results of our overseas students, who cram a two-year course into one and sit exams in English (their second language), presents an extremely misleading picture of our GCSE achievement. We are the only school in the area with such an anomaly; therefore this has created an inaccurate portrayal of our A* - C grades passes.

"Seeing the figure might lead parents to believe mistakenly that standards have dipped. However, looking solely at the GCSE results, which are representative of our main school achievement, we attained a creditable 88.7% A* - C, with 88.1% achieving 5 A* - C passes, including Maths and English; therefore our true percentages compare very favourably with other schools like for like.

"This of course is why parents should never be influenced by dry statistics alone, without the application of some common sense, and it's why the publishing of statistics, which don't compare schools using common criteria, is grossly misleading. It's also another reason to curse the league table culture, which is so detrimental to British education.”

Dr Winkley also commented on the School's A-level performance. "Our A-Level results are not skewed by the addition of spurious figures, as in the GCSE tables, and I'm pleased that our overall results were good. 98% of students achieved 2 A- levels or greater, whilst the percentage with 3 or greater was 90%. This was a solid performance, especially as some of these children were from overseas. It reflects the hard work undertaken by our students, many of whom have gone on to study at universities in the UK and overseas.”

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