Our new rankings show ELT standards are rising to meet statistical norms, Melanie Butler explains

“Schools aren’t getting better. It’s all grade inflation,” the superstar school principal snorts over lunch.

I choke on my spring roll. After all, his super-famous school has just rocketed up the rankings following an excellent British Council inspection.

“We base all our scores on inspection data,” I object. “Are you suggesting the inspectors have gone soft?”

In the last ten years the number of centres awarded eight or more areas of strength has gone up significantly and the mean average score across the accredited sectors has continued to rise gradually.

But, as we show in our analysis of the statistics on page 28, the distribution of scores now looks statistically normal.

The inspections system has changed. The criteria have become clearer. And step by step, year by year, more and more centres have figured out what they need to do to do well.

Some call it box ticking, I call it improving performance.

The Gazette rankings aim to sort out the significantly better from the good.

That’s why in this issue we are reporting the rankings in percentiles.

In testing, they call this norm referencing. I call it a fairer way to report the results when lots of centres get the same high scores. ELC Bristol and Wimbledon school of English Both have a perfect score: they are both in the top percentile.

“The British Council do not worry about staff turnover. But we do.”

“But the scores are wrong,” another school owner shouts at me. “Your top schools have 15 strengths,” she protests. “We got 17!”

I’ve given up trying to explain the difference between an area of strength (the basic data point we use) and a strength in one of 100 or so individual criteria. Nowadays I just e-mail our step-by-step guide on how we rank schools. You can find the latest iteration on page 23.

Next time I’ll also send on the tips for managers put together by ELC Bristol on page 22. And I’ll underline their tip number 1, staff retention, in red ink.

It won’t make any difference to their next inspection report. Alone among pretty much all the UK’s multifarious educational inspection bodies, the British Council do not worry about staff turnover. But we do.

And so do the Chinese, at least to judge from their polite, detailed e-mails. And they expect us to know every stat from every school in every sector.

So we have decided, in this issue, the least we can do to help them is to list the top UK language centres, sector by sector. You can find the results on pages 30 to 34.

This means we have had to limit the industry-wide ranking to the top fifty language centres, instead of our normal top 100, which will appear in the September edition.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

“You don’t care about schools like us,” one London principal told me, “you just write about the top schools.”

This year I called back to congratulate him on making it into the top 100.