School league tables may be counter-productive says report

University of London researchers, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, looked at how top performing countries measured children's wellbeing, educational achievement and health. They found a wide variation in health and wellbeing outcome indicators.

Wellbeing indicators included participation rates in voluntary activities and perceptions of wellbeing gathered through surveys. There was also a variation in how indicators were used: most of the 14 countries studied used them to monitor general standards, and nine to monitor school's performance, but five did not publish schools' results.

The report said: "Given the practices in other high performing systems, government should now reflect on whether reporting of child outcomes at school level in league tables may be counter productive. It is thought by some of the governments we explored to be unhelpful because schools in deprived areas may be doing well given the profile of their students but appear to be failing when compared to schools in affluent areas. The performance of the education and wider children's services system could be monitored using national standardised tests without the need to report at school level."