We warmly welcome Oxfordshire County Council's latest effort to measure what our schools are achieving for our children. Teachers and heads have been distinctly lukewarm towards the plan to adopt the Fischer Family Trust (FFT) measure of how schools are performing against expectations.

Schools complain about the Government's exam statistics and league tables because they tend to focus attention on those at the top and bottom who often have very good or poorer results for a reason. They cannot have it both ways. The new statistics that the education authority will be using focus attention on how schools are performing against expectations, ie are they exceeding them, meeting them or falling below them. As another useful measure of what schools are doing, it seems a good idea to us.

Let us not forget that Oxfordshire's schools are not performing as well as their peers in similar shire authorities. One of the most important jobs the county council has is to bring that performance up.

Interestingly, only two schools performed statistically higher than the estimate at GCSE and a fair number were below, some by quite a significant margin.

Of course, you can prove anything with statistics but, at the very least, these figures give parents another tool to use when they question the performance of their schools.

What worries us is that one head said the information was fine for internal consumption, but was not suitable or relevant to the public domain because it did not tell the whole story.

In other the words, we the public are not entitled to every bit of information so that we can put together the full story. Frankly, the more information there is in the public domain about the performance of our schools the better.

And if the FFT measures help Oxfordshire County Council to focus its efforts where they are most needed then that can only be a good thing.