By Gary Eason Education editor, BBC News website

The government is going to use a different system in league tables

A proposed system for measuring students' progress in sixth forms and colleges in England would have awarded them points for failing their A-levels.

Students with good previous exam results would have had more points for failing than less capable candidates.

School and college leaders said the idea, co-ordinated by the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), was unacceptable. Ministers asked for a rethink.

Now a different progress measure is being tried, ignoring fails altogether.

Because of the change, implementation of the new system has been postponed to September next year.

The LSC's proposed "learner achievement tracker" has been devised in talks with the Department for Education and Skills, school and college leaders and the post-16 inspectorates.

It is imperative that we take the time to get this right Jim Knight School Standards Minister

It will be used by Ofsted when making judgements about how well schools and colleges are doing.

It is also intended for college managers to see the progress students make in different subject areas.

In a letter to the school standards minister, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, John Dunford, noted that - "perversely" - a different measure was being piloted this year in the government league tables.

The government accepts this might confuse people.

Equivalences

The problem of what to do about failures arose because of a new points system issued by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

That was devised to cover new "equivalences", by which a raft of vocational qualifications will count alongside A-levels in the league tables.

It assigns 270 points to a grade A, 240 for a B and so on down to 150 for an E. Someone who fails gets zero.

The problem is the gap between a failure and the lowest pass grade (E) is 150 points - five times the gap between the other grades.

So when a school's overall score is added up, someone who failed - even if they had been predicted to be borderline - wipes out the progress shown by four or five students who achieved a grade above what they had been predicted to get.

One solution was to assign 120 points to a fail - so the gap to an E was 30 points, the same as the gap between the other grades.

'Unacceptable'

In his letter, Dr Dunford said this was rejected as it might "undermine" the QCA's points system.

"A somewhat surprising alternative has been adopted," he wrote.

Those who failed would be awarded a number of points equal to their average score in all subjects at GCSE level.

He raised various objections to this as a "wholly unacceptable" method - one of which was that a fail would be accorded different points depending on how bright students were.

In reply, the School Standards Minister, Jim Knight, said his department had asked the LSC to take a fresh look at how fails could be included in the learner achievement tracker "without affecting either the integrity of the system or the outputs it produces".

"It is imperative that we take the time to get this right," he added.

So the pilot would be extended into 2007.

'Not perfect'

The LSC's head of quality assessment, Paul Martinez, told BBC News the problem was complex and had been debated for some time.

The solution for qualifications with five or more grades - such as A-levels, AS-levels and BTec national diplomas - was to exclude fails from the calculation.

One advantage was to remove a "perverse incentive": if a college thought someone would fail they could avoid a bad score by simply not entering them for the qualification.

According to Dr Dunford this had been the original plan. The others had been tried because feedback from schools and colleges indicated some were unhappy with it.

Mr Martinez said: "It's not perfect but it's what people have signed up to."

'Some confusion'

The Department for Education and Skills is still going to use a different "contextual value added" (CVA) score in the post-16 league tables.

The minister told Dr Dunford he accepted that having two systems "could initially cause some confusion".

But Mr Knight believed it was necessary "and that they will be complementary".

In its announcement about this year's league tables, the department said it had hoped to have a common measure for both purposes.

But it had become clear this would not work.