With all the confusion and controversy surrounding school league tables where can parents go for clear information about a school’s academic performance?

With constantly changing parameters the official Department for Education league tables are a source of confusion to parents and frustration to head teachers. This is why for parents looking for a private school, the best-schools.co.uk league tables are so valuable.

For independent schools the recent announcement that the much acclaimed  international GCSE (IGCSE) qualification, chosen by many top schools for its academic rigour, would no longer be included in the DfE league tables, provoked harsh criticism from the HMC chairman, Richard Harman who described it as an “absurd situation”.  Eton College, probably the most famous school in the country has gone from achieving 100% A*-C grades at GCSE level to 0%!

The DfE claims to have “stripped out qualifications that were of little value” – the IGCSE, of little value? Really? This has become the qualification of choice for many highly academic schools, chosen because it provides a much better foundation for advanced study in the 6th form and does not include endless controlled assessments which eat into valuable teaching time.

Best-schools.co.uk publishes clear and accurate league tables of the top independent schools which include ALL GCSE and IGCSE qualifications, with schools ranked according the percentage of A*/A grades achieved by pupils in each cohort. The tables are clear, transparent and fair and are trusted by parents and advisers all over the world looking for a private school in the UK.

Another reason that the best-schools.co.uk league tables are more accurate is the fact that we track down the results of the 60+ private schools who don’t publish their exam results in August plus those schools and colleges who do not supply their results to DfE.

Of course league tables and exam results can never present a full picture of school performance, and parents looking for a school will be taking many other factors into account. However, families investing huge sums of money in their child’s education have a right to know how a school performs academically.