I spent a pleasant couple of hours today trying to decipher the new primary school league tables. I use the word pleasant in the sense of having your toenails clipped with an angle grinder.

Why do these things have to be so complicated?

To get the information for the tables you have to download them from the Government's web site. The only way you can get the info for Wilttshire is to get to download the document for the whole country.

This is a bit like going into Woollies and asking if they have any Kit Kat chunkies and being asked to look for yourself around the firm's main distribution depot in Dudley.

Once you have downloaded the document, which rendered my computer more lifeless than Pete Doherty on a Sunday morning, I had to get our IT department to extract the Wiltshire data.

Right, well that's all you need then, why don't you just get on with it, I hear you say. Ah, but then you have to understand the data, I reply. And that is where you begin to lose the will to live.

Each school's data comes in 27 different columns, under helpful headings like Contextual Value Added Confidence Intervals. What does this mean? Well luckily there is a 23-page guide you can also download.

Unluckily it is written in purest Civil Servantese and makes no more sense than if I cut out all the words individually, stuck them on to marshmallows and then hurled them at a wall in order to read them out in the order in which they stuck.

After two hours of head-scrcratching and tea drinking, we chose which bits of information to discard and attempted to put together a meaningful table.

But I don't really know if what we have produced is really going to tell parents if their children go to a good school or not. All most mums and dads want to know is whether the teachers can spell, the lessons are encouraging and there are enough books to go round.

Does anyone really care what the perecentage of unauthorised absence days are in relation to its Level Four Average Point Score? Or do they just want to know that the head is interested in their child's reading progress?

If that is the case, who are these tables for? Only people with degrees in educational science or an English to b******t dictionary to hand.

I'm frightened to think how m uch money is spent on the information gathering and production of these tables. I imagine whole armies of civil servants sit around conference tables thinking up new terms with which to confuse the poor sods who have to make sense of them.

The money 'invested' is probably enough to give heads the resources to stop worrying about making ends meet and actually concentrate on educating children.