The reason is quite simple: zealous adherence to the religion of free-markets. According to the government parents are forever demanding 'choice' (actually I th

The reason is quite simple: zealous adherence to the religion of free-markets. According to the government parents are forever demanding 'choice' (actually I think what most of them want is for the local school to be decent, and not to have to ship their kid 50 miles a day to some distant school…). So of course parents must be provided with some way to compare schools, no matter how statistically meaningless it might be, and thus league tables were given great significance. The current government plan to take this even further by allowing private companies to run state school for profit. Thus further incentivising cheating, manipulation of test results, pushing students into easy subjects, teaching to tests, not allowing entry to students who won't perform well, not allowing students to sit tests if they might not get top marks, underfunding of 'hard' subjects and so on. Parent's power to actually complain about a school is reduced as well: schools will no longer be run by democratically elected local authorities, but by the largely unelected board of governors. If you have a complaint they won't deal with (most schools won't even tell you the names of the governors), you have to go directly to the secretary of state and, as this submission demonstrates, getting an answer from Mr Gove is very difficult (no doubt you would be fobbed off with a "we don't interfere with the running of individual schools" response).