Meanwhile, from the vantage point of 500 metres inside England, I have been making the usual fuss about our positive figures; it’s been another year in which we’ve broken our records for average points per candidate at A-level and the percentage of candidates gaining at least five A* - C grades at GCSE. I haven’t mentioned that, on any available measure of prior attainment, these were the two most able year groups of students the school has ever had.

I also made much of bucking national trends as only 44 per cent of the GCSE cohort were girls, who significantly outperform boys nationally. In fact, our boys overwhelmingly outshone our girls in this year group, and I could argue that we have mastered the art of tempting boys to be competitive academically. What I am not likely to broadcast is that the more important issue for us is not why our boys performed so well, but why our girls may have performed less well than their counterparts across the nation.

As this year’s league tables are published, we would do well to reflect on how riddled with anomalies and unfairnesses they are. In my own school, this cohort of GCSE students was joined in Year 9 by two American lads, intelligent certainly, but unused to the academic discipline of English secondary education. We worked hard with them and reached a point by mocks at Christmas when we were able to predict confidently that they would both gain five A* - C grades. Unfortunately, their parents decided in March to take them back to the United States. We hope we can convince the DfES that although these pupils were in our January count, they should not register as achieving nothing in the summer’s GCSE results.

We feel further discriminated against in that a pupil in Year 10 but of Year 11 age, with some special educational needs who was held down a year at primary school, will count as achieving nothing at all in this year’s results. In fact, she has made such tremendous progress that we confidently expect a strong line of higher grades next year - these, of course, will not count either.

At the same time, a pupil from South Africa who joined us 18 months ago wanting to take GCSEs but is a year older than the GCSE cohort, does not exist according to the regulations, despite gaining excellent results. As if these nonsenses, which obviously add up to several percentage points, were not enough, we also absorbed into the cohort halfway through Year 10 some children with fathers in the services. Several of these pupils had strong enough prior attainment records to suggest they could gain a good line of higher GCSE grades, but they have moved between schools too frequently, with all the attendant problems that brings, for consistent enough educational progress. Some of the syllabuses or option subjects they had been following in their previous schools didn’t fit our provision, and most of them just missed out on at least five C grades.

The publication of these league tables is obviously a central plank of the Government’s accountability culture and just about everyone - even if we despise ourselves for it - cannot help taking a significant interest in them and drawing conclusions about the performance of individual schools. Sadly, this leads to greater divisions between the reputations of schools rather than the general raising of standards, which is presumably the real priority.

The heads of Welsh schools, especially those which would have done well in the league tables, have a genuine moral dilemma this term. Like me, most are intensely sceptical about their inherent value and have made that clear in the past. They can, of course, choose to publish their own results. To my enormous admiration they have largely stuck to their principles and kept their results within the confines of their own schools.

John Claydon John Claydon is head of Wyedean school, Chepstow