Cribsheet daily 13.01.11

Kitten using litter tray — All the Ecat needs is a user-friendly image. Photograph: Alamy

I tweeted the other day about the trouble sub-editors were having in deciding what to call Gove's new oeuvre: the English baccalaureate (not great in a headline, is it?), English bacc, English bac, Ebacc … and now I am thrilled to discover (thanks Claire Phipps) that the Daily Mash has it licked:

"Schools across England are to change the name of the new baccalaureate to something like 'bat' or 'cat'.

The European-style qualification has left thousands of youngsters confused and angry with its long train of syllables that seems to go on for ages.

Now ministers want to make the exams less daunting by reducing the brand name to a single syllable that can be easily represented with a picture.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: "A lot of them don't even make it into the exam hall. They see a sign reading 'baccalaureate' and just stand there staring at it blankly for a couple of minutes before going home to watch snuff movies.

"If we have a picture of a nice cat we might get a few more of them through the door."

Sorted.

On Twitter, @localschools_uk is collecting academic success stories who wouldn't have qualified for an Ecat. It tweets:

"Are you a proud English bac failure? Let us know and join one university professor who is. http://ow.ly/3CtTT"

And @andyburnhammp wants to know:

"What gives one man the right to tell children it's OK to do Latin but not ICT or music?"

Secondary school league tables

Here's a rundown of the Guardian coverage of what we learned from the release of statistics on GCSEs and A-levels yesterday:

• Only one in six pupils achieved the English bac, awarded to those with grade C or above in English, maths, science, a foreign language, and history or geography.

• More than 200 schools failed to meet the new target of 35% of pupils achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths.

• The schools giving the best value for money according to the new tables of expenditure.

The new data showed no correlation between spend and achievement, a point taken up by Mike Baker, in his blog, who asks what the point of the pupil premium is if expenditure makes no difference to results.

• The most improved school was threatened with closure: Perry Beeches turns itself around.

• Our live blog carried reaction and debate all day yesterday.

The Guardian league table data

• Here are our school-by-school tables, organised according to local authority.

• And on the Datablog, we have local authority spending compared with results.

• But the best fun is to play around with our map that shows every school in the country with a summary of its results. So, as my colleague Clare Horton just showed me, you blow it right up, find your own street, and then click on all the schools in reasonable proximity to see how they did.

Other education news from around the web

• Is there a genius in all of us? asks the BBC. Apparently geniuses are made not born, according to new research, and brilliance is not innate:

"Everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of 'innate' no longer holds together."

• @itspetergabriel, and yes it's Peter Gabriel, tweets:

"There is a wonderful school in Cambodia... but unless we can raise money quickly the school is going to to close http://bit.ly/hh5b62"

• Andrew Adonis comes out to the Spectator: I back Michael Gove, he declares.

"The coalition is taking the academies movement further, it is making it possible for more successful schools to become academies too and I support that."

Quel surpris.

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Competition

Children aged between seven and 14 can now enter the Young Human Rights reporter of the year competition, run by learnnewsdesk, the Guardian's online news service for schools, and Amnesty International. A winner and two runners-up in the primary and secondary school categories will win a trip to Amnesty International and the Guardian headquarters in London as well as an MP3 recorder. The closing date for entries is 14 February.