School leaders and teachers are used to reading tables ranking school GCSE and A-level results each year, congratulating colleagues if their school has risen, and managing the inevitable questions if it has fallen.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with such tables, and parents have every right to use them. But to me, there is a question as to whether schools have become too ready to accept the authority that such rankings claim.
In much public discussion, a table built principally from raw examination outcomes has come to stand for the quality of a school. Arguably, it does not deserve to carry that weight.
Easy success metrics
The issue is visible at almost every open event. Parents understandably ask about grade 9s, A*s, Oxbridge offers, and a school’s place in the local hierarchy.
The “results slide” appears very early in a head’s presentation, and a published ranking can seem like reassuring independent confirmation that a school is good.
Teachers and leaders know the picture is more complicated, yet almost all schools’ own communications often reinforce this simplistic measure. We repeat a position in a table, place it on the website, or use it as an unquestioned shorthand for success.
The most selective schools do this because raw outcomes are powerful marketing material. However, lists of grades do not show what schools added to the progress of pupils who arrived there already performing at a very high level.
It tells a parent where pupils finished, not how far they travelled.
What isn’t revealed
A school that recruits a cohort already working securely at the highest levels should expect strong results at 16 or 18. Those results may reflect excellent teaching, ambitious pupils and a demanding academic culture.
They do not, however, allow us to separate the contribution of the school from the advantage of the starting point. Conversely, a school with less striking headline percentages may have helped pupils outperform comparable young people elsewhere. A raw attainment table has no way to recognise that achievement.
This is especially relevant this year. The GCSE results currently being publicised and ranked are those of the 2025/26 cohort, for whom the Department for Education will not publish Progress 8 because key stage 2 tests were cancelled during the pandemic.
Progress measures should return for the pupils sitting GCSEs in 2027, but for now, raw attainment has an even clearer run at defining the public conversation.
Within schools, we do not normally work based on final attainment like this. Leaders routinely use MidYIS, Yellis, Alis, FFT and other nationally benchmarked data to examine pupil progress from a starting point as well as attainment at the end.
At post-16, the national accountability system still includes value-added measures comparing outcomes with those of students with similar prior attainment.
Value added is not a magic answer: different baselines, small cohorts, subject entry patterns and confidence intervals all require careful interpretation.
Changing communications
But there is certainly an argument for presenting progress data with care, alongside raw attainment, rather than just using the number that happens to be easiest to publish and most flattering to those who admit the highest-attaining pupils.
The challenge for schools is therefore not to boycott examination results or to become defensive when parents ask about them. It is to refuse the premise that a league table position, or similar, is a verdict on educational quality.
Schools could start with their own communications. When celebrating results, they could distinguish clearly between attainment and progress, explain the admissions context where relevant, and publish independently benchmarked value-added information where it is sufficiently robust.
At open events, leaders could talk confidently about both the grades pupils achieve and the progress that has taken them there.
A collective approach would carry far more force than individual schools making careful qualifications in the small print.
A sector shift
Heads’ associations, school groups and data providers could develop a common, parent-facing way of presenting outcomes: raw attainment, cohort size, relevant starting-point information and a transparent progress measure.
That would not eliminate competition between schools, nor should it. It would make the competition rather more honest.
It would also give parents something better than the comforting but misleading idea that a league table can tell them, without context, where their child will be best educated, and could lead them to ask more useful questions than simply how many A*s a school achieves.
Luke Ramsden is head at St John’s College Cardiff
