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The public perception of comprehensive schools has been formed more by the problems than the successes. In an article in the, Martin Stephen, the high master of Manchester Grammar School, claimed that There is growing evidence that our [comprehensive] schools are failing pupils and parents . . . If our maintained system is failing pupils and parents, is it because the ideal of the comprehensive school has become that most awful of hybrid animals, a cross between a sacred cow and a white elephant?

An Exeter University study of parent attitudes towards schools found that only nine per cent of parents thought that standards were poor at their own child’s school, while 37 per cent thought that standards were falling nationally. Part of the problem has been the inappropriate criteria by which comprehensive schools are judged. School performance tables contain many columns of information, but the greatest attention is paid to the proportion of 16-year-olds gaining five high-grade passes (A* to C) at GCSE. This is a poor performance indicator for any type of school, but especially for comprehensive schools in which the prime aim must surely be the raising of achievement of every individual student, from the most academically able to those with the greatest level of special educational need. A sensible measure of success should reflect the efforts of teachers and pupils at all levels. Instead of giving credit only to those who gain grade C and above, and hence forcing schools to place special emphasis on the grade C/D borderline, performance indicators should give equal credit for all improvements in grade. One such measure is the average points score for GCSE grades, which gives the same credit for raising a grade B to an A, or a grade F to an E. Better still, performance should be judged according to the value added by the school to each child’s level of attainment on entry. The deficiency of the government’s performance indicator for secondary schools was never more apparent than when David Blunkett, then Secretary of State, in a speech to the Social Market Foundation in March 2000, threatened with closure of all schools which had less than 15 per cent higher grade GCSE passes for three successive years. The 80 schools, identified in the Times as being in this category, included many which had previously received glowing reports from OFSTED, acknowledging the high quality of their performance under very difficult social conditions. The list also included nine secondary modern schools in Kent – the county with the largest concentration of selective schools – which could hardly be blamed for the low academic ability of their pupils in an area where such a high proportion attend grammar schools.

The use of a deficient performance indicator in drawing up league tables of schools contributes greatly to the poor public perception of comprehensive schools. These league tables appear in national and local newspapers twice every year – when the examination results are published in August and again when the government publishes more definitive lists of school performance in November. It is little short of scandalous that comprehensive schools and selective schools appear in the same tables, leading to headlines in some newspapers, such as Grammar schools scoop GCSE laurels. The way in which the league tables are structured by the government invites such a response, with its conscious or unconscious denigration of the performance of comprehensive schools. One has to ask, as Benn and Chitty asked, ‘what kind of a society spends so much time trying to undermine the education system upon which almost all its population depends, while declaring its commitment to the welfare and educational development of these very same pupils?’