League Tables, Love Them or Hate Them

Excerpt

Medicine does not entirely ignore qualitative research but is, understandably, happier with objective measurements and with numbers to which well-established techniques of summary statistics and more sophisticated analysis can be applied. Lately, several countries, including the UK, have been trying to devise numerical performance indicators for services such as health and education, the idea being to find the equivalent of the balance sheet in the commercial sector so that hospitals and schools can be run more like businesses. The results are published, often as league tables. Forum for the Future, a UK-based charity, has recently carried out a similar ranking exercise for British cities.1 …