As you read this various Education Advisers members of staff are dashing round the country presenting Crystal Awards to Independent Schools for their 2014 exam results. We give every school in our tables a certificate, but most of those in our Top Ten positions also get a very smart crystal award, engraved with their academic achievements, so as we visit schools taking as many photographs as we can for our websites and blog, we must take a moment to congratulate all the schools on another year of terrific results!
Why do we compile 11 different league tables?
To tell you something about our League Tables, we started the process in 2007 and it was in direct response to the hundreds of requests from parents looking for rankings of schools.
We gradually subdivided the tables up into different curriculums - GCSEs, A Levels, IB , Highers and Scottish Highers - because we don't like converting one curriculum's grades to another using spurious formulae - the prime example being the UCAS conversion of IB DP points, so bad that even Universities ignore it! We also set our own ground rules for minimum size of cohort and minimum number of boarding pupils to qualify as a boarding school.
Some schools object to our tables and strangely it's mostly those schools which have not performed very well. We do make it crystal clear on our websites that nobody should choose a school on league table position alone. However, we do believe every parent has a right to know about a school's academic performance and also be impressed when a school wins one of our crystal awards.
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