A HEADTEACHER was left fuming after the Government published exam results which said that 91 per cent of his pupils had failed their exams.

Amarjit Toor, principal at the Guru Gobind Singh Khalsa College, said the embarrassing gaffe by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) was “very damaging” for his independent school which has built its reputation on excellent exam results.

The blunder, included in the performance tables published on the DCSF website on Friday (January 16), claimed that the school got only a nine per cent pass rate for pupils achieving five A* to C grades in their GCSEs.

Mr Toor says it is particularly galling because they actually achieved a 100 per cent pass rate - a statistic it has proudly splashed across the Chigwell school's website.

To make matters worse, Mr Toor has been told it could take up to ten days to have the erroneous information corrected on the DCSF website.

He said: "Parents, inspectors and other schools will look at this and think 'My God - what is happening at that school'.

"It's really very damaging for a small school like our's, and I am just preparing myself for the phone calls that will be coming in from worried parents."

Lee Davis, a member of the team at the DCSF which compiles the performance tables, said the mix-up had happened because the school had failed to confirm whether its pass rate was correct when asked to do so in September.

He explained: "When we look at the pass rate for just the 15 year-olds, which is the standard practice, the pass rate was actually very good - at around 98 to 100 per cent.

"But it is going to take us between five and ten days to investigate what has happened here, and make changes to the published information as is necessary."

The school, on Roding Lane, is owned by a charitable trust, and has about 300 pupils. It mainly caters for Sikhs, although it also takes youngsters from other faiths, and has consistently been included in the list of top performers since it opened in 1993.