Pause to Reform: League Tables in a Post-Covid World

League tables should be reformed to give parents the information they really need

First published in 2021.

One absurdity which has stood out to me during the pandemic is league tables. In many ways this aspect of the system has not been a lesson I have learnt in my lockdown - rather, the lockdown has provided even more evidence that the system needs reform.

In a plot twist which is going to annoy my progressive friends, I actually have no problem with league tables existing. On balance I agree with individuals being able to choose the school to send their children. This has not always been my view (definitely not!), but on the whole my liberal (in the real sense of the word) practical instincts trump my more collectivist utopian visions. I broadly agree that the best person to decide how you should live your life is you. So, you should decide where to send your children to school, not the state. Before anyone complains, I am fully aware of the negatives of this approach.

So, far from wanting league tables to be abolished, I actually want to enhance them.  I want them to provide parents with more of the information they might need in order to make a choice. In other words, I want them to start to do what they already claim to do. This, to me, is the absurdity - the claim for league tables existing is that they give parents information with which they can make choices, but anyone who works in education knows, they are either lacking in real information, or could even be giving false impressions - league tables, Ofsted reports, Potemkin school websites and open-evenings that at times would make Kim Jong-Un proud! 

Here are two proposals for next steps to make league tables actually work (on their own terms) and provide parents with information which will help them to make the best decision for their children. It goes without saying that league tables should continue their furlough until at least 2023.  However, we should use this delay in order to reform.

One: More Please! Assess what we value.

We must make a new, better league table system which actually reflects the reality and complexities of education. This reflects the reality that citizens do not have an homogenous view of the purpose of education. Rather, we should incorporate these differences across schools in the information we provide for parents so that they can make what they consider to be the best educational choice for their children.

Atul Gwande suggests in his book ‘Being Mortal’ that over the course of medical history a consensus emerged that the aim of medicine was to keep the body alive. If you are a heart surgeon, you are measured on how many hearts you keep beating - preferably inside a body. This sounds great and life expectancy seemed to be increasing every year. The parallel with education is that a consensus seems to have emerged over the last forty years that the measure of a successful school is how many children leave with good grades on standardised tests. The better the grades a student emerges with, the better their life chances. All seems very logical and intuitive. 

There are two issues with this and the first is another example of absurdity. 

Firstly, unlike with the heart surgeon example, the exam system has a built-in failure rate (I know it is more complicated than this - but it is the effective outcome of the model). It is the equivalent of every heart surgeon in the country having to submit every heart they have kept beating every day to be assessed and then the bottom 30% being made to stop. On another day, those 30% of hearts may have been in a weaker field and thus appeared comparatively stronger. 

So, the first mistake with league tables is that they are based on data from a flawed, or at least complicated, system. They build in competition and make educational success a zero-sum game when it definitely shouldn’t be and does not need to be. 

Much more importantly is the second issue and this is where the hope lies. Gwande’s argument is that the medical profession is coming to the realisation that the measure is too simplistic. I apologise in advance for my macabre explanation, but we would all choose to live rather than die if given the choice. However, if we take into account the quality of life after any medical intervention, it makes the decision slightly more difficult. Would you prefer to die in one year but lead a completely healthy life or live an extra five years with crippling ill-health and no independence? There are people who would make different choices in this scenario - but that is the point! With a (more) complete set of data, you can make a better choice. These are the debates in education and we must have serious conversations about a drive to increase performance in exams which results in a higher position on the league tables, but at what expense? 

So, my proposal is that we bring together teachers, students, parents, stakeholders and we list all of the different things we want out of our education system. Through a process of consolidation, we arrive on a broad list of things we want our schools to provide. Now, each school will of course have a different approach which matches their educational philosophy, but at least this will be clear and transparent. 

So in addition to publishing exam results, we could publish what percentage of students learn an instrument, go on trips, have guest lectures, take part in work experience, or go on to university.  Five years after leaving school, former students could be asked to complete a survey about their educational experience and another ten, fifteen, twenty years later so that the results cannot be gamed. We could also develop measures to track oracy, collaborative problem solving, ‘grit’ and other skills and dispositions.

This reform needs to go hand in hand with a second suggestion - one without the other would simply not work.

Two - making gaming prohibitively difficult, or, the side effect mentality. Minimising the downsides.

The final absurdity of league tables in their current form is they give perverse incentives to school leaders to make choices they may consider to not be in the best interest of an individual child, but the interest of the organisation. I won’t dwell on this too much, but we can all imagine the difficult decision between squeezing some extra progress out of a student at the expense of not allowing them to dedicate their extra-curricular time to a musical, drama production or sport event. To go back to my liberal point I made at the start, this should be a decision made in consultation with the student, parent, a school - not imposed on them by a state institution. We all want our children to do well, but we will hardly ever perfectly agree what ‘well’ means.  As Yong Zhao, far more eloquently than me explains, we need to be open about the potential side-effects of our educational vision. This pill has a good chance of curing your headache, but may also give you a stomach ache. This educational approach has a high chance of getting your child Grade 8s in Maths but will mean they have to stay in school until five every evening and not take part in any extracurricular clubs. Do you take the pill? Take it or not, at least you now know and don’t take it under the false pretense that there are only upsides.

The worst-case scenario in this reform is that if we simply give school leaders even more perverse incentives. Therefore, we need to make the league tables so broad that no school will do well on all. In fact, it should be impossible (and set off alarm bells) if a school is perfect at everything. We have finite resources (time) and so there will always need to be side effects of any particular school approach. This is, we all know, the reality of the situation, but it is hidden by the league tables in their current form. The last thing we need is school leaders running ‘happiness interventions’ on poor students who are pressured into filling a wellbeing survey to increase the school score. Or, hundreds of last minute school trips planned purely to make the school look like it does a lot of trips!

The reduction of education to performance in standardised test is damaging in lots of ways. The focus of this piece is to show that this reduction into league tables of exam scores hides the complexities of schools and forces each area to have better and worse schools. This will always be the case, but I want parents to know more about what exactly we are better and worse at, so they can make a better choice when it comes to the biggest investment in their lives - their child’s education.