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Exam results "need a health warning"
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School exam results should be published with a "health warning", according to researchers.
Graeme Paton
Parents should be told that scores in Sats tests, GCSEs and A-levels are heavily influenced by “factors beyond the school’s control”, it was claimed.
The Teaching and Learning Research Programme said official league tables often gave a skewed impression and many schools at the bottom of the rankings were performing well.
The study, backed by the Economic and Social Research Council, comes as thousands of teenagers prepare to receive A-level results on Thursday. GCSEs taken by pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be released next week
Each year raw exams and test data is converted into league tables used by parents to help choose a school for their child.
But researchers said this information should come with a disclaimer, clearly stating what the data showed and what it was designed to measure.
The study, published by 10 leading academics, said: “Conventional school examination data, then, should be published with this ‘health warning’: that they measure only part of a school's business and that these results are influenced by factors beyond the school's control, such as the prior attainment and background characteristics of its pupil population.”
The report also suggested that exam results should be published with information about the possibility that there could be errors in the marking.
Previous research has estimated as many as one in five results in Sats tests - taken at the end of primary school in England - may be wrong.
“Policy-makers sometimes claim that the publication of national test results for each school is a value-neutral act of sharing information with the public,” it said. “If the public then, on the basis of these data, makes judgments on the overall quality of each school, policy-makers might argue that this was not their intention.
“But this is disingenuous. Information will always be used in one way or another. A better system would acknowledge that there is a need to ensure that the public understands what these data can tell them, and what they cannot.”
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