TEACHERS responded to the publication of this year's primary school league tables with a by-now-familiar mantra - that they don't show the whole picture of schools' performances.

But another "whole picture" they did not show was the impact of the tests on schools across the country.

That was because the Government - claiming that, for primary schools, local comparisons matter most - only required publication by local education authorities of the test results of 11-year-olds in their areas.

For a government which has given education top priority and has set national goals for the test results, the decision not to publish national tables is a strange blurring of the picture - and one that encourages the biggest teaching union, the NUT, to hope this is a step towards abolition of the tables altogether.

Teacher resistance to them is understandable - up to a point. They only give crude information based on raw test results which can vary from year to year with differences in school intakes.

But what they cannot deny is the stimulus that the tests and, more importantly, publication of the results have for improvement. For look at that effect, now that, without government assistance, today a national league table has been unofficially compiled from the piecemeal ones published locally four days ago.

It shows spectacular improvements in many schools' performances with twice as many achieving top marks in last year's tests in core subjects than the year before, and some of the biggest leaps being gained in schools which last year recorded the worst performances in the country.

But even allowing for the crude snapshot nature of the results and the annual variations in intakes that might show a see-saw effect in individual schools' performances year by year, the noticeable effect of the tests and publication of the tables is improvement overall.

Indeed, we have a senior government source today paying tribute to the combined effect that targets and tables have in galvanising schools to improve on their previous results.

Why then reduce the effect by restricting it to smaller snapshots? And where were would this valuable effect be if teachers who oppose openness and accountability got their way and had the tables abolished altogether?

For all the objections, what today's findings show parents is that if schools are publicly assessed and are shown to need to do better, many of them will.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.