The GCSE results published in August 2012 have been like no others. From the moment of their release there was turmoil. It was only quieted when a judicial review in February determined that Ofqual and the exam boards had acted lawfully.

Countries are increasingly comparing themselves in education league tables. But how is it that England can be 27th and sixth at the same time? Confusion in the Ranks explains.

2012 was the year when Ofqual’s ‘comparable outcomes’ policy began to bite. A-Levels 2012 reviews the trends in entries and results overall and between genders and the countries of the UK.

Education in England lacks a clear shape. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final years of secondary schooling. Raising the participation age to 18 creates the opportunity to design an array of academic, practical, creative and occupational pathways to take people forward to university, training, employment and future lives.

Teachers trained in schools are more likely to get a job and rate their training highly than teachers trained on university courses. The Billericay Educational Consortium, the King Edward’s Consortium and the University of Cambridge emerge as top overall.

England lags far behind other countries in educating the brightest. A first step would be to hold schools to account for the progress of the highly able. Current measures are pitched at the lowest and middling performers. Other countries bring together the brightest. The raising of the participation age provides an opportunity to create an array of pathways post 14 on the model of the university technical colleges.

GCSE results have risen for the 24th year, but not in Northern Ireland where there was a sharp fall, and Wales where they have been on a plateau. Could this have anything to do with the changes to the education systems?

Has Ofqual finally decided that enough is enough when it comes to grade inflation? Grades tended to stabilise this year rather than rising appreciably as they have done in the previous 29 years.

For the first time data are available on teaching take-up by job-based trainees, so for the first time providers in all three main routes into teaching can be compared. School-led approaches do better for employment, but university courses receive higher Ofsted grades. But how can training be ‘outstanding’ if the trainees do not become teachers?

Proposes a radical solution to bring England into line with best international practice: undertake national examinations at age 14, instead of age 16, and offer pupils an array of distinct and credible educational routes thereafter.

The coalition government’s teacher training policies do not add up. This is a great pity because thanks to the TDA we have the best teacher training statistics in the world.

Comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated and the main reason for this is their admissions and selection processes rather than their location. The country’s leading comprehensive schools are more socially exclusive than the remaining grammar schools.

All countries face a dilemma in physics education: do they gear it mainly to the science professionals of the future or to science for citizens so that all can participate in a society’s decision-making about scientific issues?

School-based teacher training has a much higher rate of conversion of trainees into teachers than the two-step process of having to recruit first to universities and then to schools.

It is an illusion to think that giving a school a subject label makes it better. Specialist schools appear to do better because from the beginning they have been good schools creamed off from a progressively poorer residual pool.

HMC schools are highly effective schools. There are some who say it is down to social advantage. But international comparisons suggest that independence itself is the most likely explanation.

Teacher trainees now appear better qualified than they were in 1998 when detailed data were first published, but this reflects the increase in good degrees awarded by the universities.

More physics teachers are currently leaving than are being replaced by physics specialists, raising serious doubts over whether the government’s target for a quarter of school science teachers to be physics specialists by 2014 will be met.

Challenges the government to allow a fair market test to discover what qualifications universities, employers, parents, schools and pupils really want rather than seeking to impose an untried diploma.