"We get the kids who are left over when others have had their choice," says Mr Phil Turner, principal of Westgate Community College in Newcastle upon Tyne.
He believes the publication of school league tables produces a simplified and false impression of how well schools are really doing.
The tables for secondary schools are based on how well their pupils do in the GCSE examination. "There's a mad rush to get children into schools that appear to be doing well," he says.
Some parents in his area are third-generation unemployed. "They don't get up in the mornings. The children don't have anyone to say work hard at school and get a job. There's no bloody job to get."
Arguably his teachers, in getting their pupils to achieve even the lower GCSE grades, are working harder and more effectively than some of their top-of-the-table counterparts.
Some schools get high results by selecting pupils who will give them these results, in the experience of Mr John McNally, head of St Bernadette's Roman Catholic School in Small Heath, Birmingham, and a council member of the National Association of Head Teachers.
His school is a primary school. Britain has league tables for primary as well as secondary schools. So as well as parents checking the league placings of secondary schools when deciding where to send their children, secondary schools are checking the league placings of primary schools to see which are most likely to give them bright pupils.
Schools with pupils from households where the parents never check whether the children have done their homework "are being compared with school where there are professional parents, parental support, support for reading and technology at home."
In France, league tables take account of how hard schools in disadvantaged areas have to work to get results, and how easy elite schools make it for themselves by selecting brighter pupils.
But, the Education Ministry complained earlier this year, the media tend to publish simplified versions of the tables based solely on exam results, and parents tend to take exam results alone into account when choosing second-level schools for their children.