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West End Extra - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published: 31 August 2007

Which schools are the ‘best’?

• AUGUST 23 was the day for GCSE results and added values, hot on the heels of key stage 2 and A-level results. Do all these tables of results help me choose a school?
It’s not just results, but the cause of results I need to know about.
Is the school with the best results the one with extra resources because it cashed in on specialist or academy status and/or because it has compliant children and good buildings that make fewer demands on its resources?
Or is the school with the best results the one with staff punching above its weight, stressed to a frazzle, who get the minister’s plaudits but tomorrow will be burnt out?
I want a school that’s got some spare fat on its resources, with best results and yet relaxed in the resources it has built up. But I don’t live close to that kind of school – I belong not to the exclusive parents in the school with the best results but to the vast majority of parents excluded from such a school.
Shouldn’t national policy – on the basis of fairness but also to enlarge the national base of skills and civilised life – be creating the best local schools for the many instead of one best school in the locality for the few?
JACK FIELD
Huddleston Road, N7

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, West End Extra, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@westendextra.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Wednesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number.
Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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