The AEU has urged members to get involved in the campaign to stop league tables after newspapers used information from the My School website to name and shame schools.

Within 24 hours of the site going live, newspapers in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and the Northern Territory printed league tables ranking schools based on their scores in the point in time, snapshot national literacy and numeracy test NAPLAN.

Along with ranking every school some papers listed “top and bottom” schools based on aggregated NAPLAN results.

AEU Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos said the league tables presented an invalid and misleading picture of school performance.

“Teachers, parents and principals repeatedly warned the Rudd Government this would happen unless they took action to stop the misuse of the data on the My School website,” he said.

“They failed to heed those warnings and now it is students and school communities who are suffering as a result.

“Julia Gillard admits league tables are damaging and misleading and make the job of teachers much harder, but she has sat back and done nothing.”

The AEU is calling for members to again write to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard to express their opposition to these league tables and call for a ban on them.

Over 12,000 emails have already been sent. Every additional one will make a difference.

Click here to send a letter

Mr Gavrielatos said the fine print on the My School website revealed for the first time how inaccurate NAPLAN results were and reinforced the fact they should not be used to measure school performance.

“The My School site shows that for the smallest schools the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 36 points,” he said.

“The error rates vary enormously according to the size of the school and shows yet again why NAPLAN scores cannot be used to rank and compare schools.

“Because different students sat the 2008 and 2009 tests there is enormous variation in the results in small schools with some changing as much as 80 points in a year.”

Download new fact sheets on NAPLAN, My School and league tables

For members wanting to know more about the damaging impact of league tables in other countries a new video has also been produced featuring a Victorian member Alisha Fleckhammer who taught in Britain.

She discusses how league tables led to a narrowing of the curriculum, damaged schools and school communities and made things much harder in disadvantaged schools. You can watch that video here.