It is not good enough to make trite comments about the the harmful effects of school league tables. The challenge is to present meaningful, rounded information to parents, writes the Minister for Education and Science, Noel Dempsey

Schools and teachers undertake an enormously responsible and worthwhile task on behalf of all of us. As a society committed to the importance of education, we want our schools to give our children the best possible opportunities, so that they can reach their full potential - not only in academic subjects but as rounded, responsible young citizens who can look forward to satisfying work, leisure and relationships in adult life.

Some young people will achieve high standards in traditional academic subjects, while others will show flair in practical skills or artistic expression. All are equally valuable - the key is that the unique potential of each child is developed fully.

In Ireland, we are fortunate that our school system serves us very well - the general standards achieved by our young people compare favourably with those from many other countries. Not all schools are the same, however. International research on schools shows that they can vary greatly in their effectiveness, even where they teach the same curriculum, operate with equivalent staff levels and serve children from similar backgrounds.

In some countries, this data has led policy-makers to publish information about the standards achieved by students in state examinations or national school tests. A range of arguments are advanced for this - governments invest considerable sums of money in schools and require accountability, parents have the right to make informed choices about the school to which they will send their children and published comparisons will encourage weaker schools to improve.

I hold the view that publishing raw data on schools cannot give an accurate indication of the effectiveness of a school. It ignores the effect that student background has on learning outcomes and can present a seriously misleading picture. For example, a school serving an area of social disadvantage may be performing extremely well if it succeeds in having all of its students complete second-level education, while another school, serving students from more advantaged backgrounds, may be performing badly yet have a number of students who achieve high academic results.

Raw test results can also distort the work of schools. Some pen-and-paper tests can only measure restricted aspects of the curriculum. We may place an over-emphasis on these limited aspects of the curriculum and other aspects of the programme may be neglected. More importantly, relying on test results as a single measure of school effectiveness ignores the rich and varied two-way exchanges between learner and teacher, and cannot adequately convey how well the school works to develop the whole student. And, rather than inform parents, crude league tables provide little real information to a parent who wants to know how suitable a school may be for the needs of his/her child.

Most seriously, crude league tables can accentuate social division. Better-off parents who can afford to transport their children may be encouraged to place their children in apparently high-performing schools located in more advantaged areas. In such a situation, it can be harder to retain good teachers in schools where they are most needed, and those schools that are performing very well in challenging circumstances can feel undervalued.

Reacting to these disadvantages and the misuse of crude school league tables in other countries, the Oireachtas decided, correctly in my view, that the Minister for Education and Science could refuse to publish data, such as school examination results, that could lead to the compilation of crude league tables in Ireland. This became law in the 1998 Education Act.

However, I do not believe in the all or nothing approach to this debate. By viewing the issue in this way, we have allowed an unhealthy information vacuum to develop. Parents, when choosing a school, have little information to draw on. Some will know more than others about individual schools, but much of their information may be anecdotal, limited or based on past experiences that are no longer relevant.

In the absence of a well-constructed alternative, it was perhaps inevitable that newspapers would address the lack of published data by constructing league tables based simply on the numbers of students going to universities from second-level schools. These tables provide a very distorted picture, ignoring as they do the relative sizes of schools, the geographical proximity of some schools to third-level colleges, and the fact that access to third-level education is only relevant for some students.

I do not want to see third-level entry data continue as the only published yardstick of our schools' effectiveness. I believe we have over-reacted to the deficiencies in crude league tables in other countries and failed to seek out a better way to describe the effectiveness of schools. Yes, the work of schools is complex, but surely it is not beyond us to find a way to present accurate and comprehensive information on their effectiveness? I think the education of young people is too important for us to say that, because describing the effectiveness of schools is complex, we should not attempt it at all.

We all know how important education is. A good education is crucial in equipping a young person to live a purposeful and fulfilling life as an adult. Every parent that I meet is very conscious of this, and wants to know how well his or her child is achieving at school. Of course, education does not happen exclusively in schools. We know that parents' interest and their support for their children's education is one of the most powerful influences on how students achieve in school. We know too that children learn from a whole range of experiences outside of school.

Not everything that happens in school results in a measurable outcome, but it probably can be described. But we should not accept that all the questions that we need to ask are wildly complex. After all, I think that it is not that difficult to establish if students are achieving competency in essential skills in literacy and numeracy during their time in primary and second-level schools.

That is why I think we need to consider again how best we might make information available on the effectiveness of schools. We need to ask if we can do this in a way that is accessible for parents, teachers and society in general, while at the same time respecting the complexity of the work of schools.

I am aware that this will pose challenges and that is why I think we should debate this matter fully. We should bear in mind the different needs of those who could use information about the school system. For example, parents will naturally want localised information on the progress of students in their children's schools. Individual boards of management will want to see how well their schools and students are doing. Teachers will be interested in information that could help them to improve their teaching and learning programmes, and society generally will be more interested in the overall success of the school system.

I believe, too, that school performance should be assessed in the context of the total operation of the school, not just student achievement. Any information system would have to use a range of indicators - not simply examination or test results - to measure the effectiveness of schools and we will need to explore fully what those indicators might be.

It would be important, too, that information on schools is sensitive to the socio-economic background of the students, their gender and ethnicity, their range of learning needs, and other contextual factors. After all, if we are trying to establish how well schools are doing we have to compare like with like. This may mean having to look at the relative progress of students over time - not simply at one point in second-level but over the course of all their time in school.

I suggest that we should not be afraid to debate this issue openly. It is not good enough to make some trite comment about the harmful effect of crude league tables and thereby dismiss our need for information on the work of schools.

I believe we have tended to be obsessed with the dangers of numerical analysis and a simplistic rank ordering of schools. This has distracted us from the real issue, which is how we could provide meaningful information about school effectiveness across the complex range of a school's activities. Our children deserve that we should rise to the challenge.