From Donald Brown, principal, St Brelade’s College.
I WAS curious to read in your editorial column that Jersey schools regularly top the national league tables in their GSE and A-level exam results.

I hurried to the nearest national newspaper for confirmation but all I could find was Victoria College listed as number 214 in a league of independent boys’ schools. There must have been about 500 schools in all, so Victoria College was more than halfway up.

So that’s what it’s all about! We are regularly being told that Jersey schools do better than schools in the UK because they score better than the national average; in other words, they come more than halfway up; higher than some of the inner city schools maybe, but lower than Cambridge or Surrey.

Once you start applying statistics in this misleading way, you can come to all sorts of dramatic conclusions. Jersey’s workforce have fewer qualifications than in the UK. This was a statistic that was once reported in your newspaper. Perhaps Jersey people are also more obese, drink more or are more prone to divorce. Perhaps their football team is better than the UK national team.

On the whole, we prefer to quote the results that place us firmly on the positive side of the national average. Jersey has a low crime rate, for example. I am never quite sure whether this means that we have fewer criminals or that we are not so good at catching them. Now I know that we simply have fewer serious crimes than Britain’s inner cities – a fact which inevitably places us above the average for Britain as a whole.

So, what’s wrong with quoting misleading statistics about the success of our school system? I can think of a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that people may actually believe them. This will lead to the comforting thought that we are doing so well that nothing needs to be changed or improved – and if there are one or two points we are not entirely happy with, like drunken teenagers roaming the streets at night, the situation can’t be that bad because we top the national league in our exam results.

What worries me more about these statistics is that they are being spun to us at the taxpayer’s expense. We actually have a States Communication Department whose job it is to present the achievements of the government in a positive light, supplying the media with favourable press notices and deliciously tempting statistics.

Why do we need to pull the wool over our own eyes to this extent? Doesn’t this create a climate of smugness and defensiveness, where the ills of society are left to fester until the truth can no longer be concealed from the public eye?
An obvious example springs to mind.
Mont les Vaux,
St Brelade.