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By Gary Eason BBC News Online education editor

The new "value added" measures in this year's league tables are a halfway house.

Ministers want to be able to show children's progress from when they start secondary school to the end of their compulsory education.

That is, from the tests they took as 11 year olds at the end of primary school, to when they sit their GCSE or GNVQ exams.

The Department for Education does not yet have the data on every single child.

It the meantime it has published not so much progress measures as work-in-progress:

the improvement one set of children has made in the first three years of secondary school
the improvement a different group of children has made in the two GCSE years

Asked why it had put out this information, the School Standards Minister, David Miliband, said in effect "because it's there".

"The value added data lets you look in a more textured way at which ones are succeeding. You can look at the common features of those schools which make them successful," he said.

He said they were "designed to help pupils and parents and schools see the improvement that's being made".

"We think it's significant to try to recognise the work being done in a number of schools, where pupils who are struggling when they come into secondary school are taken forward."

How they work

But the measures are not simple.

THE 'BEST OF THE BEST' AT ADDING VALUE
The Latymer School, Enfield
Yesodey Hatorah School, Hackney
Hollygirt School, Nottingham City
Pipers Corner School, Buckinghamshire
Surbiton High School, Kingston upon Thames
St Michael's Catholic Grammar School, Barnet
Watford Grammar School for Girls, Hertfordshire
Dixons City Technology College, Bradford
The top 324 schools

In headline terms, a score of 100 is average and more is better, less is worse.

But in practice it turns out to be much more complex.

Each pupil's achievement is compared with those of other pupils nationally who had the same or similar prior attainment.

The pupils' individual scores are averaged to give a score for the school as a whole, represented as a number based around 100.

What you get

The department says that if every pupil in a school achieved the median (middle) outcome, the school would score 100.

NATIONAL CURRICULUM 'KEY STAGES'
Key Stage 2: ages 8 to 11
Key Stage 3: ages 12 to 14
Key Stage 4: ages 15 to 16
GCSE/GNVQ exams: age 16

For the Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3 measure, a score of 101 means that on average each of the school's pupils made one sixth of a National Curriculum level (one term) more progress than the median.

A score of 99 means they made a term's less progress.

For the Key Stage 3 to GCSE/GNVQ measure, a score of 101 means that on average each of the school's pupils achieved one extra GCSE/GNVQ point than the median - a grade higher in one subject.

A score of 99 means they achieved one fewer GCSE/GNVQ point - a grade lower.

Head count

However, the statisticians say that size really does matter.

On the first measure, for schools with 50 or more eligible pupils, scores of 99.1 to 100.9 are "broadly average" while for schools with more than 100 pupils, scores of 99.3 to 100.7 are broadly average.

On the second measure, scores of 95.8 to 100.8 are broadly average while for schools with 100+ pupils, 96.5 to 100.1 is broadly average.

And so on. For schools with 10 pupils in either measure, only scores of below 92.8 or above 103.8 are likely to be "significantly different from the average".

Overall the scores range from 92 to 107.4 on the first measure and 80.7 to 116 on the second.

Top schools

There is also something of a trade-off.

If a school does very well in bringing children on in their first three years, it will be all the harder to improve their attainment in the next two.

And vice versa. Officials acknowledge that a school would find it easier to achieve a better score on the second measure if it had done less well on the first.

So - unusually - the department has published its own league table highlighting schools which have done well on both measures: a "best of best" table (see below).

This shows that selective schools are disproportionately represented at the top.

Selection debate

Professor David Hopkins, director of the education department's standards and effectiveness unit, said: "It does appear that when you are selective in terms of your intake, that concentration of high-achieving pupils will give you a little bit more advantage."

It is not for central government to scrap grammar schools

Education minister David Miliband

He added that in a big international study of teenagers' achievement, it was interesting to note that Finland had reduced selection and raised achievement "across the board".

David Miliband played a straight bat on the issue.

If enough parents eligible to take part wanted a local ballot on selection then it could be held, he said.

"It is not for central government to scrap grammar schools, it is a matter for local decision-making, in the way that was set out in the 1998 Act, and the government sticks by that."

The table below shows schools with both value added measures in the top 25% of all schools nationally. Those at the top in bold are in the best 5% nationally on both measures.

Click the name of any school for its own page in our main tables.

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