A HEADMASTER at a leading North-East private school is demanding urgent changes to the way Government school league tables are compiled, after his pupils scored zero per cent.

David Dunn, head of Yarm School, said his students got a score of nil because International GCSEs aren’t included in the figures.

He said The Department for Education’s tables showed no pupils at Yarm achieved five A* to C grades, when in fact out of the more than a thousand GCSEs taken by Yarm pupils in the summer, over 90 per cent achieved A* to B grades.

“Despite being one of the best performing schools in the country, we find ourselves languishing at the very bottom of the league tables.

“It’s an insult to both our pupils, who work incredibly hard to achieve fantastic results, and our talented staff, who work just as hard to support them.

“It makes a mockery of the league tables, which may as well not exist if they aren’t going to give an accurate reflection of performance and is a stark contrast to the reality here at Yarm where our students are achieving amazing results. These figures have been released just a few days after a record breaking 12 pupils secured places at Oxford and Cambridge.”

The Department for Education did not respond to requests for comment at the time we went to press. However education secretary Nicky Morgan wrote an article in The Daily Telegraph in which she argued private schools should drop international GCSE qualifications because they “are not as challenging” or rigorously assessed as their traditional counterparts.

International GCSEs are considered an equivalent to regular GCSEs but were developed by experts at Cambridge University International Examinations.