The Department for Education has issued new league tables to measure schools' achievement. They show that performance is up, especially at state schools. The news is not all good, however, because the validity of the new tables has been questioned. Controversially they include a range of vocational subjects not previously counted. The Independent Schools Council points out that certificates in cake decoration or pattern cutting and wired sugar flowers are deemed equivalent to GCSEs in English, mathematics and science. A distinction in cake decoration was worth more than an A grade in GCSE physics under the "absurd" system, it said.

The tables for 2004 have gone so far in the direction of including every possible qualification that they no longer have any value whatever in reporting on meaningful achievement in key academic subjects or serious vocational studies…Not only can these tables not be compared with any previous published data about schools; they no longer tell parents anything valuable about the quality of a school's academic or vocational programme. This is not even a case of trying to compare apples and pears: it is comparing apples with candy floss.

(The Level 2 certificate in cake decoration, offered by the Awarding Body Consortium (ABC), requires students to "demonstrate skills in coating cakes of various shapes," know how to make sugar paste, and to prepare simple marzipan figures).

Stephen Twigg, the School Standards Minister, dismissed the criticism as "old-fashioned educational snobbery," saying that the move reflected that "the world has moved on."

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has also stirred controversy by downgrading the relative worth of high GCSE passes, and by its decree that an intermediate level GNVQ in computing is "equivalent" to four GCSEs at grades A* to C. It all heightens suspicions that the public sector tends to pursue the targets themselves rather than any reality they are supposed to measure.

What is needed is outside evaluation. We prefer external assessment of a company’s credit worthiness rather than its own evaluation. Similarly, we could put more trust if outside bodies set the standards for school performance and measured their achievement. When the state measures its own performance, we have less confidence in its objectivity, or in the validity of its results.

(Full story in Telegraph and Times)