EAST Lancashire headmaster Neil Thornley displays the sensitivity that is common among teachers to the media's monitoring of their profession's performance.

For at the presentation night of Fearns High School in Stacksteads, where he is in charge, he complained that if people based their judgment of schools and education on what they read in newspapers, they would believe that teachers were under-performing, pupils under-achieving and heads and governors were not to be trusted - whereas teachers were producing very good results, often under quite unacceptable workloads and pressure from the Government.

Indeed, in the week that he spoke, the new school league tables - showing that half of East Lancashire's secondary schools had below-average examination results, Fearns among them - the grim fact was revealed that, nationally, 35,000 pupils left school last year without even the lowest GCSE grade to their credit.

But, dire as this disclosure of wholesale failure is, only slightly less depressing to me is the supposedly much-brighter "true" picture of education that Mr Thornley suggests that the critical media fails to highlight.

For he said: "Pupil achievement is up and up - at Fearns, 100 per cent of Year 11 pupils who attended achieved at least one grade at GCSE."

If he had been talking about each getting at least one pass - that is a grade of A* to C which are equivalent to pass marks in the old GCE 'O' level - I would have considered it an accomplishment that was not very much to boast about. But, no, it was just grades that he meant - the majority of which are equal to GCE failure marks. If this is a measure of achievement being up and up and something the knocking newspapers might do well to positively report, I must start reading Alice in Wonderland to find out why.

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