Recipe for self-delusion

So, activists at the National Governors Association - which claims to represent 300,000 governors but has a mailing list of 35,000, according to its website - want to obscure school results for parents and the wider community by no longer publishing exam and test results. This is not only a recipe for confusion, it is one for self-delusion. The idea that school governors - and I am one - shouldn't know how well their school performs in absolute as well as comparative terms is a seriously retrograde one. The fact is that it is through the publication of such results - as well as with testing and inspection - that thousands of schools have been spurred to improvement over the last decade or more. And given the amount of contextual information now included in the tables, it is particularly odd for the council's chairwoman, Judith Bennett, to claim: "We've got no objections to accountability, what we are clear about is that the league tables are not really very informative." Now if that's really the problem - which I doubt - let's have more not less information.