The signatories include the major public, private and Catholic school education unions and peak professional bodies for maths, English and science teachers, among others.

They have written to federal Education Minister Julia Gillard, as well as each state and territory education minister, to strongly urge them to take, ''legislative action prohibiting the creation and publication of league tables flowing from the collection of student and school performance data.''

National standardised literacy and numeracy testing began last year and will be accompanied by the staged adoption of a national curriculum and new, more open reporting procedures.

Schools will this year be required to disclose their results on the internet and be publicly compared with similar school communities, while parents will get an annual report card detailing how their child's school fares in what Ms Gillard has described as a new era of unprecedented transparency and, ''transformational change''.

As well as providing more detailed results on each student, schools will also be required to move to a system of publicly disclosing everything from literacy and numeracy results, retention rates, and student satisfaction surveys to school income.

The moves are tied to the next four years of Commonwealth funding.

And while state and territory education ministers have resisted direct comparisons of schools instead approving comparisons of ''like'' schools to provide longitudinal analysis of system performance the peak education bodies have warned against the information being manipulated by the media and other third parties to form league tables.

The letter says, ''The profession requires assurances that the misuse of this data will not occur. The damage to curriculum provision, students and entire school communities resulting from league tables is well-documented in international research and evidence''.

And it also warns that, ''Legislative action is now required to prohibit their creation and publication by third parties''.