THE best state schools have overtaken their fee-paying rivals for the first time in league tables of examination results published today.

Two city technology colleges with comprehensive intakes recorded the best scores in GCSE and vocational qualifications at 16, while two grammar schools topped the A-level league.

The Independent Schools Council (ISC) accused the Government of rendering the performance tables meaningless by taking into account hundreds of extra qualifications.

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) used a new framework for the first time to calculate average points per candidate for all approved qualifications at 16. The open-ended scale replaced one that took account only of students’ best eight results in GCSE and vocational GNVQs.

A DfES spokesman said that this had raised the proportion of pupils passing the equivalent of five good GCSEs by only 0.1 of a percentage point from 53.7 per cent in 2004.

State schools claim the top four places in The Times’ rankings of achievement at 16 in the 2004 exams. Thomas Telford School, Shropshire, scored 760.3 points, more than 100 ahead of Brooke Weston City Technology College in Corby, Northants, which was second. The Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, fifth overall, had the best result in the independent sector. Colyton School, Devon, and Colchester County High School for Girls, in Essex, both selective grammars, had the best A-level results, ahead of fee-paying Withington Girls’ School in Manchester.

But the ISC said that the Government was “comparing apples with candy floss” by deeming certificates in cake decoration or pattern cutting and wired sugar flowers equivalent to GCSEs in English, mathematics and science.

A distinction in cake decoration was worth more than an A grade in GCSE physics under the “absurd” system, it said.

“The tables for 2004 have gone so far in the direction of including every possible qualification that they no longer have any value whatever in reporting on meaningful achievement in key academic subjects or serious vocational studies,” the council added.

“Not only can these tables not be compared with any previous published data about schools; they no longer tell parents anything valuable about the quality of a school’s academic or vocational programme. This is not even a case of trying to compare apples and pears: it is comparing apples with candy floss.”

Stephen Twigg, the School Standards Minister, dismissed the criticism as “old-fashioned educational snobbery”, saying that the move reflected that “the world has moved on”.

“This is a significant step forward in recognising the achievements of all pupils and of the importance of flexible and vocational routes of learning,” he said.

The Level 2 certificate in cake decoration, offered by the Awarding Body Consortium (ABC), requires students to “demonstrate skills in coating cakes of various shapes”, know how to make sugar paste, and to prepare simple marzipan figures.

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