The excellent headmaster of Ardingly College is quite right to draw attention to the difficulties newspapers face with their league tables in placing schools that study both the International Baccalaureate and A-levels.

The IB is, however, taken by a miniscule number of pupils in the UK.

Figures for 2008 show that only 0.28% of British applicants to university had studied the IB.

Most IB candidates in England are foreign students and there is no doubt that the exam has done much to shore up boarding numbers from overseas in those schools that have introduced it.

However, the overwhelming majority of schools, such as Brighton College, remain loyal to the A-level and, for us, the league tables published by newspapers are far less confusing.

They simply reveal how many pupils in a particular school are securing the A or B grades at A-level or A* or A grades at GCSE that are now demanded by leading universities.

I believe that parents have a right to know this information and regard, as rather patronising comments by some headmasters, that parents might not understand that there are all sorts of other ways of judging a school and therefore that league tables should be abolished.

Parents have already shown how discerning they are in choosing our schools for their children.

Surely they can be trusted to understand and interpret objectively the annual academic snapshot that is all that a league table represents.

Richard Cairns
Headmaster
Brighton College