School League Tables

I thank my wife for passing this snippet on - not sure where she finds it, but she works with a load of statistics people at Cambridge University and they spend hours looking at this stuff. I do wonder if Harvey Goldstein has been consistent on this issue, but isn’t it ironic that we now seem to have come full circle? How much longer will we have league tables for? I have always believed that they did not measure anything particularly meaningful in terms of school effectiveness or ‘quality’ and were just a crude index of social advantage or disadvantage.

The Centre for Multilevel Modelling’s George Leckie and Harvey Goldstein have had a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society:
Series A, 172(4), 835-851, ‘172, Part 4, pp. 835-851, ‘The limitations of using school league tables to inform school choice’.

Each year, the government publishes league tables of GCSE results to help parents choose their childrens secondary school. But as George Leckie and Harvey Goldstein explain, the past performance of schools is an imprecise guide to how they might perform in the future.

Speaking about the findings, George Leckie said:

“Parents need to be aware that the tables contain less information than official sources imply and that this necessitates a lower weight being placed on them as compared with other sources of information available to parents. It is also worth noting that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have either never had or have abandoned publishing school league tables.
Now seems a good time for England to follow suit.”

For further details go to the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society:
Series A, 172(4), 835-851: