By: Mike Hosking | Monday, September 24, 2012 8:11 AM

So now we can see in all our schools who’s passing and who isn’t, how well they’re reading, how well they’re writing. The initial flourish of figures didn't seem to reveal anything we probably didn't already suspect. Most kids do well, the ones who don't you could have guessed, boys struggle in some things more than girls.

I suppose it’s human nature when we look at a list of schools to work out who’s where and place some sort of emphasis on that. But then we already do that don't we. We all know what our schools are like. We all have a view as to why one school might be better than another the same way some make specific choices of schools for their kids. Schools have become prescriptive. I went to the school because it was the closest one to my house. That’s how simple it was. These days it's a project, it’s an undertaking.

The reason National Standards and all the figures that come with them are so controversial - well controversial among those who don't like them which seems mainly to be a selection of some teachers and all the unions - is that you’re suddenly entering a world of accountability, or as one story I read over the weekend put it ‘the unhealthy world of competition’.

Now to start with competition by its very nature can’t be unhealthy, in fact it’s quite the opposite. It’s good for us. We need to know, and this applies to kids too, where we sit in the world. We need to know where there is room for improvement and where we excel. As parents it’s our right to know in specific detail just what it is our children are being delivered by way of an education. You can’t place the amount of importance we do on education without measuring it.

We measure everything in life. I’ve never seen why education should somehow be exempt. Those who don't like all this argue ‘it’s not apples with apples’, but it is. What we want for our kids is for them to read and write and add things up. I wouldn’t have thought it was too hard to work out whether schools are being successful at that. The approach might vary but the end result is what we need to know.

They also don’t like it of course because numbers tell the truth. Numbers are the facts and the facts are that in some schools, in some subjects, in some regions, things aren’t what they should be. Where once you could fill the room with enough hot air to bluster your way through it, numbers bust the myths.

One of the great lessons of life is we need to be held to account. Held to account in all areas and aspects of our lives by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. These figures start to hold our schools and the systems in which we teach our kids to account. That can be no bad thing.