Samantha Pancheri, Green Party Spokesperson for Schools, said:
"Parents, teachers and pupils are no doubt alarmed by the publication of the Department for Education school performance tables, which appear to illustrate a drastic decline in the pass rate of GCSEs. However, upon closer inspection, this reveals a much deeper problem with this method of measuring school performance.
"By constantly changing criteria and failing to take into account the hard work done by school staff to compensate for the difficulties faced by disadvantaged pupils, these tables undermine the true picture of how our schools are performing. Schools who fail to meet the government's baseline targets are at risk of being forced to become academies, which have been exposed as making no difference to school improvement targets and at best fulfill the government's ideology of marketising our public services.
"There is a well observed relationship between child poverty and lower educational achievement, which we should be taking further steps to redress rather than ranking schools in such a crude and unhelpful manner. It is increasingly evident that the current system of measuring school performance is outdated, and an alternative is urgently needed. Schools need to be able to work collaboratively with locally based assessors, and put an end to the ineffective and expensive Ofsted culture."