I hope the government’s review of school accountability measures will do more than making a few tweaks to stop schools “gaming” the system (“Points-per-grade scale proposed to tackle league table ‘gaming’”, 14 December). When parents choose a school, they want to know more than how well it does at GCSE: self-confidence, employability and inspiration to study further are some of the other outcomes that are just as important. They may be harder to measure than examination grades, but this is no reason to ignore them. Until we have a more nuanced approach to measuring schools’ performance, it is perfectly reasonable for headteachers to do all they can to optimise their school’s performance, and my money would be on headteachers outplaying the system every time.

Sir John Holman, Department of Chemistry, University of York.