While welcoming this year's overall improvement in primary standards, The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) believes league tables are a crude way of evaluating performance in primary schools.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the NAHT, said while there was clearly plenty to do, primary pupils, teachers and leaders could be proud of their achievements. However, he urged caution in interpreting the data, which school leaders believe focuses on a narrow and often unreliable measure of school performance. 



Hobby said: “League tables are a crude way to evaluate the performance of primary schools. The inevitable focus on a few headline measures of attainment reduces the breadth of a modern education to a few bare statistics which conceal as much as they reveal. There is far more to value about a school than its ability to get children to pass tests – especially in the light of recent concerns about the integrity of the external examination process.'

Further information:
NAHT