Fresh from last week's strike, the National Union of Teachers called for school league tables to be abolished today.
Its call follows the news that the heads of Eton College and St Paul's boys' school are boycotting the Independent Schools Council's league tables this summer.
Anthony Little, headteacher at Eton, and Martin Stephen, headteacher of St Paul's, will refuse to submit their exam results to the ISC for publication in August.
Both are also highly critical of the government's performance tables published annually in January, but they can't get out of those.
Martin Stephen, head of St Paul's, says the league tables are "misleading" and treat subjects and schools as if they are equal.
At face value, this could sound like elitism from the head of one of the UK's leading private schools. But Stephen argues, fairly I think, that the government's league tables pit schools in very different circumstances against one another.
He says a "far more sane system" would be for the government to take each type of school and produce a mean performance for that type of school, so parents know what an inner-city urban comprehensive should be achieving, rather than comparing it with a fee-paying private school in an affluent area.
Most teaching unions hate league tables - and their use will be a major part of the Commons education select committee report on testing and assessment due out in mid-May.
And delegates at the Boarding School Association's annual conference that takes place tomorrow will hear that some schools - private and state - prevent pupils from taking exams they aren't confident of passing, so concerned are they by their position in league tables.
But ministers insist that the (evil) media would manipulate the results if they didn't produce the league tables themselves, and that they help raise standards and are an important resource for parents.
What do you think? Do they inhibit your teaching and focus too much attention on results at your school? Or do you, as a parent, rely on the information they provide to choose which school your child goes to? Are they a necessary evil? Or would you back calls to abolish them altogether?
