This comes after he bashed some of the very schools which inspection quango Ofsted has ranked among the nation's most improved.

Earlier this month the Secretary of State for Families, Education and Children gave schools just days to come up with an action plan to tackle their "poor" results of less than 30% of pupils getting five or more GCSEs including maths and English.

Critics are outraged that the announcement was made just as students are taking their exams and that it was based on old data.

Some of the handful of Lancashire schools on the hit list were still celebrating being praised by Ofsted.

Among them is Skerton Community High School in Lancaster, which was recently named among the top 1% nationally for value added qualities and the City of Preston High School, which is among the top 25%.

Central Lancaster High was judged to be an outstanding school at its 2006 inspection and it, along with Heysham, Skerton and Hornby, achieved value added scores in 2007 significantly above average, while performance is continuing to improve significantly at Heysham High School.

And Hornby High School achieved the Government's previous floor target of 30% of pupils gaining A*-C at GCSE for the first time in 2007.

One man who has been at the receiving end of the use of outdated statistics is headteacher Tony Hills.

The Walton-le-Dale Arts College boss locked horns with Ofsted last year when it used old data to asses the school's performance and then declared it was not good enough.

Mr Hills protested and although he managed to win some of his arguments, the old statistics still stood and the Bamber Bridge school was labelled as needing to make "significant improvement".

For the full feature see Monday's Lancashire Evening Post.