Sir – Your recent report of local schools’ results, highlighting Faringdon Community College as ‘top state secondary’ in last summer’s league tables, masks interesting detail.

Discounting debates about politicians setting curricula; the perils of high-stakes targets pressing target-setters to deliver compliance; (‘grade inflation’); and unintended consequences (do we risk stretching the most able while ensuring borderline entrants overcome the target?). The GCSE measure you highlight is not that which currently attracts accountability.

In fact, the top state Secondary including English and Maths at GCSE (L2) is Matthew Arnold; Faringdon is fifth. The other measure worth noting here is the ‘value added’ score, showing, if greater than 1000, accelerated progress against expectation (and if less, slower).

On this measure, Oxford Community School is top. The school beats both local Academies, councillor Waine will note, on both value added and L2.

Of course, competition is not native to our Secondaries, recognising the difficulties of ‘market dogma’ and ‘choice’ in so rural a population. So, instead of local league tables, we need other relevant standards of performance. Oxfordshire’s statistical neighbours (SNs) offer such a benchmark and, while half our schools fall below the our SNs average, and while Oxfordshire languishes eighth of 11 in that company, we must ask those around the leadership of our Secondaries what they propose effectively to improve the lot of our young people.

Faringdon consistently bests SN comparison on both the L2 and value-added measures, making a compelling offer to its young people. Too many county schools are consistently below these averages and, where there are no ready alternatives, let their young people down. School leaders and councillors equally need attend to this long-standing under-performance: on the one hand for the sake of those young people’s future; and, parochially, for the sake of that elusive ‘excellent council’ rating.

Peter Martin, Bampton