The impressive improvement in the performance of Oxfordshire’s secondary schools is threatening to embarrass those responsible for our primary schools.

Whereas secondary schools are now flying high in the top 25 per cent in a new Ofsted league table, our primaries languish in 108th place out of 150. But as with so many school league tables it is far from easy to draw the right conclusions about what is going on in our classrooms.

The reality is that Oxfordshire primary schools have improved too, with big gains since the dark days of 2010 when test results showed Oxford’s seven-year-olds as the worst in the country at Key Stage 1.

That shocking statistic in a city known in every corner of the globe as a centre of educational excellence certainly concentrated minds. Initiatives have come thick and fast with the Reading Campaign, set up to improve literacy levels among Key Stage 1 pupils, and moves to see secondary and primary schools sharing best practice with the launch of Education Excellence in Oxfordshire and the Oxfordshire Teaching Schools Alliance.

Even Oxford City Council — which is not of course the education authority — felt obliged to act at the beginning of the year with the imaginative town-gown Leadership for Learning programme.

This has seen dozens of heads, senior teachers and chairmen of governors from 12 primary schools, serving the most disadvantaged communities, working with some of the most experienced educational leaders based at Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University. The urgency of the situation persuaded the city council to invest £300,000.

Yet anyone tempted to despair at seeing our primary schools only just ahead of Reading and Slough in a table showing the percentage of pupils attending good and outstanding schools should recognise turning around primary schools is an even greater challenge than raising GCSE grades.

For a start there are simply many more of them, making focus on leadership, staffing, teaching methods and challenges of individual educational establishments harder. At the same time a greater number of primaries are sited in, or close to, pockets of deprivation, with inevitable impact.

The difficulty primary schools have in attracting heads is a particular problem for Oxfordshire, with house price and salaries meaning good and experienced heads have not been clamouring to come here for many years.

Those who do will certainly face huge pressures, not least with many schools facing rapid expansion, building work and pressure for space, given the unprecedented increase in children needing school places.

Then there is the issue of improving pre-school facilities. It all means that turning around our primary schools is going to be a slow and difficult task. The attempt to involve successful secondary school heads and both universities should give cause for optimism in the longer term, if only vacant and soon-to-be-vacant headships can be filled by the people who matter most, headteachers of the highest calibre.