Reducing schooling to the Top Ten format is entirely wrong

In the late 1990s, I was part of a Channel 4 commissioning team that invented the Top 10 list programmes, and their generic equivalent, the pop-culture countdown shows. Our mission was to create whole evenings of modern nostalgia that would entertain thirtysomething viewers who wanted an escape from the curse of family entrainment.

Our crimes were minor at the time – the Top 10 Road Movies, The Top 10 Punk Singles of all time and the Top 100

Comedy Sketches of all time. They were supposedly democratic and sometimes even involved web-votes and national surveys, but in the main they were editorially contrived to bring the most commercial and the already popular to the surface.

I had no idea at the time that we were surfing a wave of intellectual vacuity – that the world can be known through lists and league tables and what we already know will be endlessly repeated.

When it came to punk, the chances of an obscure New York garage band

outstripping The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK were below nil. When it came to Great Sitcom Moments it was inevitably Del Boy falling through the bar and Hancock giving blood that raced effortlessly to the top of the charts.

I can be honest now – the list shows were the biggest contrivance I’ve ever been involved in.

They dished up recycled populism, allowing viewers to gorge on what they already liked. They rarely challenged popular culture and never, to my knowledge, had any real surprises.

They were a bit like Scotland’s education league tables, except not quite so damaging.

One list that springs effortlessly to mind was the Top 10 Football Bad Boys. Since the majority of Channel 4’s audience resides in England there was one stand-out candidate: the coke-snorting, rule bending genius that is Diego Armando

Maradona. Not for the first time England raged at his “Hand of God” goal as Scots cheered the wee bandit on to greatness.

List culture has had a further boost with broadband and the promiscuity of the World Wide Web. Now, we have become so acclimatised to seeing complexity reduced to fragments that we rarely challenge it: “Four Things We Now Know About The Mueller Inquiry”, “Islam In Five Simple Phrases” and “The Superstars of Brexit”.

This desire to make the complex simple is at the root of my current rage and it worries me where public discourse is heading.

Last week the Evening Times in Glasgow and its sister paper The Herald published the Scottish schools league tables, a relatively simple but hugely controversial idea that masked many faults. I cannot think of an editorial device that had enraged me as much as this.

Don’t get me wrong, having been a commissioner of many similar ideas, I understand why these league tables appear and do not underestimate their value in a world of clicks and eyeballs.

But they rarely provide lasting value other than the entirely crass conclusion that schools in rich areas are generally ok.

Reducing pop music or sitcoms to a crude hierarchy is one thing, exposing the complexity of schooling and education to the same flatulent analysis really does beggar belief.

As if the gods of paradox were looking down on us the very same week that the Scottish schools league tables were published in the Evening Times, Channel Five were dedicating precious airtime to the UK’s Favourite Crisps.

The broadcaster even contrived a pyramid system to give their list spurious science – the God Tier, the Top Tier, the Mid Tier and the Losers.

You may not know this, but Lenzie Academy and a packet of Wotsits had very similar ratings – popular, of reasonable quality, but not quite at the top of the charts.

Schools like Lenzie academy deserve to be judged by more thorough criteria

I say this not to undermine or sneer but to underline the ludicrousness of the rankings system. Lenzie Academy is a great school – I know several kids who go there – but it deserves to be judged by all the criteria that come into play in an educational establishment, not arranged on a list as if it’s akin to packets of crisps.

The backlash against publishing the school tables in their rawest from generated significant criticism and the Herald was right to publish a series of follow-up features and rights-of-reply. Counter arguments that at least enriched the debate.

Maureen McKenna, executive director of education for Glasgow City Council, argued forcefully against the league tables and referenced an email she had received from a head-teacher which described the table as “the annual public humiliation season’’.

YOU don’t have to be a hand-wringing liberal to feel her pain. After a year of working hard, directing staff, finessing lesson plans and addressing every conceivable social issue in a demanding environment, to have your work trashed on the back of a dumb idea must be infuriating. Some things lend themselves to lists, while others are simply too complex – education, public health and neuro-diversity are not like a bag of crisps, or something that can be organised in crass hierarchies.

Nor do they tell us much about the future, only about the superficialities of the past.

In a rebuttal in The Herald, McKenna wrote: “As a maths teacher and former HM Inspector, I understand fully the limitations of drawing conclusions from just one statistic. It is too easy for the media to say that this is what parents want – where the ‘good schools’ are – and creating a league table is the simplest way to do it.”

Therein lies one of the many problems with league tables and lists: they have become a barometer for social aspirations and not much else.

Last week I tried hard to understand their appeal and, with the exception of a layer of middle-class yearning, I found them to be empty and banal.

League tables say very little about individual schools and their specialism, about great teachers and not so good, about the serendipity of a group of friends meeting at school and encouraging each other to thrive and have fun while learning.

I come away lacking the kind of knowledge that might interest me. Which school in Glasgow encourages analytical thinking in modern studies? Which school enables risk-taking in creative writing? Which is most likely to stimulate entrepreneurial thinking? And which is best for girls who want to break with type and succeed in science, technology and mathematics?

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation is one lens through which tables may be meaningfully read, but when the tables are dominated by schools from the wealthiest communities it leaves many questions unanswered.

In whole areas of Glasgow, schools are teaching more and more children where English is not the first language at home, but we have no way of knowing if this holds a school back or ignites the increased learning capacity of immigrant children.

Those questions and many more remain unanswered.

We live in a country that is trying, but not always succeeding, to solve problems that are not captured in multiple deprivation indices either.

Dyslexia, autism spectrum disorders and ADHD are rising, in the main due to early intervention and better diagnosis, but nothing in the league tables gives even the remotest hint as to what schools are progressing in those key areas, or where we might find best practice.

Discussing what your favourite crisps are can be a good way of whiling away a bored half-hour – but as a mechanism for analysing the state of Scottish education, it is woeful.

The answer is never cheese and onion.