Knowledge is power. It is detailed knowledge of the marketplace that gives strong companies an edge. It is scientific knowledge that will eventually generate the growth our economy needs to get us out of the mess we’re in. And it is individuals who have built up their own stock of intellectual capital through a proper rigorous education who are best equipped to survive and prosper.

That’s why it’s crucial that we know what’s going on in schools. The school league tables, which will be published later this week, give us the chance to pose awkward questions: why some schools perform poorly. And why more schools don’t emulate the best.

But we know that league tables don’t work as well as they should. The government has twisted their original purpose – to make schools more accountable to parents – and turned them into a tool to bully heads. The principal measure by which schools are now judged is their ability to ensure that 30% of pupils get five GCSE passes at grades A* to C. Those schools that fail to pass this benchmark, whatever their circumstances, get threatened with closure. Those that pass, even by a whisker, are let off the hook.

The pressure to hit this one narrow target tempts schools towards softer exams, which will bump up a school’s league table ratings but won’t give students the strongest possible set of qualifications to compete in the job or university market.

It’s striking that, in the past two years, the number of pupils taking media studies GCSE has increased by 43%, even though dons have warned that pursuing such soft subjects won’t help students get into university. It’s even more remarkable that the increase has been driven almost entirely by state schools.

In the independent sector, where schools are accountable to parents rather than to ministers, heads know that their future depends on offering rigorous qualifications that employers and universities value. That’s why the best independent schools not only shun subjects such as media studies but are also increasingly moving away from state-run GCSEs altogether. Schools such as Eton and St Paul’s don’t feature in, or come bottom of, GCSE league tables because their students have avoided those exams to pursue more demanding courses such as the international GCSE.

Our league tables also create another perverse effect. Because state schools are judged by the government purely on the numbers who secure a C pass or above, the pressure is on to spend most time coaching students on the borderline between a D and a C, while the very brightest, and those less able, are neglected. For those of us who believe that every child matters, a system that incentivises teachers to concentrate their efforts on the few, not the many, is quite wrong.

That’s why we believe that the whole exam and league table system needs reform. We need more sophisticated and user-friendly measures. Instead of schools being primarily accountable to ministers and bureaucrats, they should be accountable to you.

We think it makes more sense to rank schools in different ways. If schools received points for each pass – so much for every A star, so much for every B and so on, like an Olympics medal table or the Norrington table of Oxford colleges, there would be an incentive for every school to concentrate on all its pupils.

We could also introduce new measures to show which schools had the most pupils securing passes in all the core academic subjects – not just English and maths but English, maths, the sciences and a modern foreign language – to help to reverse the trend toward soft subjects. Our aim is to have the maximum amount of information in the public domain to enable parents to choose schools in tune with their children’s needs.

We would also like to give state schools the right – which only independent schools have at the moment – to offer their students rigorous qualifications such as the international GCSE and the international baccalaureate, which are recognised as more valuable than GCSEs and A-levels.

Crucially, we want to ensure that our state-run exams are as testing as those in the world’s best-performing education systems, such as those of Singapore and Taiwan. Those countries are our economic competitors, so our children need to be educated at the same level. That means less emphasis on modules and coursework and more on the proper, rigorous testing of knowledge.

Opponents of league tables say they generate an unnecessarily competitive environment. The truth is the world economy has become a desperately competitive environment – and unless we do everything we can to improve educational performance, especially for our poorest children, then we’re destined to fall further and further behind.

Michael Gove is shadow secretary of state for children, schools and families

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