Following on from an earlier report that one in 5 schools were to be told to improve or face closure, an investigation by the National Union of Teachers has revealed that of the 607 schools "named and shamed" for having less than 30% of pupils achieving at least five good GCSE's including English and maths, 25% were graded as good by the latest Ofstead report, 16 were judged outstanding and only 10% were actually identified as needing intervention.

Link to full article from the BBC

Confused?

You could certainly be forgiven for not being able to make head nor tail of this.

Some schools that are rated good or even outstanding according to the last reports also struggle to ensure that many of its pupils achieve a good set of exam results.

So what does this mean for us parents trying to understand how good the schools are that we send our kids to? Just about the only thing that can be said for sure is that you cannot take one set of statistics on its own. You need to look at all the information you can, and that includes information that is not tied up in pure numbers which often hide useful additional insights. A "good school" (whatever a "good schools" is) depends on many, many things, not least of which what YOU think is important for you and your child. Only some of these factors can be reduced to numbers and percentages. There are lots of other factors which could influence you to pick one school over another, regardless of their realtive positions in the different rankings...