Much as I applaud and congratulate the staffs of Tiffin Boys, Tiffin Girls, Kingston Grammar School and Surbiton High School, which have featured so highly among the list of the best schools in the country, I must sound a warning to those who then translate these figures as reflecting adversely on the teaching skills and dedications of those who work in schools achieving less prominent positions in these tables.

I am sure that the heads and staffs of the schools mentioned would be the first to agree with this caveat.

In education, success breeds success. A school that appears regularly in the top 10 per cent of the nations schools then becomes the target of parents who believe, rightly or wrongly, their children of primary school age will prosper in the environments of such exalted company.

It aint necessarily so. However, what does happen is that such schools have a glut of anxious mums and dads trying, as they see it, to do their best for their children of primary school age.

A glut means competition for places which, in turn, means selection is used to enable these schools to choose the brightest of their applicants not only from Kingston but, since the Greenwich judgement, from miles around.

I dont complain, it is only natural for schools to follow this course of action. But to return to my original point, the comparisons between teaching abilities at top performing and other schools in the borough, is severely flawed.

If I may use my own experience of teaching in several of Kingstons primary and junior schools, it used to be, and maybe still is, that many parents use 11+ results as the deciding factor when choosing a school for their children.

How many 11+ successes did you get? If this is to be how parents saw me then, when in one school where 30 to 40 per cent regularly went to selective schools, my teaching ability would be rated sky high. In another school, where one or two per cent of grammar school selected children was the norm, then I was looked upon as inferior material. Yet I worked as hard, taught as skilfully, and was equally as dedicated wherever I worked.

Various suggestions have been put forward as ways by which an Advantage+ factor could be included in these tables. How many pupils have free school meals, what is the percentage unemployment in a schools catchment area, even the number of truants was thought to be the base for Advantage+ assessment.

All of which require subjective interpretation and such ill defined statistics can be interpreted in a multitude of ways.

Yet the answer to this problem of achieving a base line for each individual pupil entering secondary schools is staring us in the face.

For years now many local education authorities, Kingston included, have used intelligence tests to identify the innate abilities of 10 to 11-year-old primary pupils to decide which type of school, grammar or secondary modern, would be best suited to the academic needs of these children.

Why should we not extend this use of standardised intelligence tests to all children going to secondary schools? Given this, it would be a simple step for each school to be given a Value+ ranking which would be incorporated in the annual publication of league tables and so eradicate this present system whereby only raw statistics are taken into account in making up such tables.

JACK MEADS

Surbiton