It doesn't surprise me. If you assume that the school system doesn't exist. And I asked you how you think people learn best and to design a system around it, this is not how you'd do it.

Several major points spring to mind:

1) Learning - once you're done with route-memorisation nonsense - is the process of discovering that what you assumed was wrong or incomplete. What's standardised testing? The punishment of being wrong or giving an answer that's more or less complete than the tester wanted.

It's hardly surprising that a culture that grows around punishing failure would be hostile to learning.

There's research backing that up. We know that people who are rewarded for finding out that they're wrong, over time, start to dramatically outperform people who are rewarded for finding out that they're right. The former group continually seek to find out that they're wrong, which they can only do by pushing the boundaries, the latter group largely stick to what they already know.

2) Effort can only take you so far in anything. This is a common enough theme here that can probably stand without support. No-one wants to hire someone who doesn't like the job, we expect them to do everything half-arsed. It's not going to be magically different for education.

So, what are the odds that someone's going to be deeply interested in everything? I've never met such a person. I've met people who are happy enough to listen but they don't go off and learn about the subject on their own afterwards.

What's even the expected return on making everyone learn everything? We need a few generalists, granted, but we'll get a few generalists anyway from people who are interested in multiple subjects. Someone who doesn't enjoy maths, what's the point of making them learn trig, or linear algebra? What's the point in making someone who wants to be a Scientist take art? Can it even be said to be learning if they're just doing it because they have to? Skills that aren't practised wither. I've met people who got quite reasonable GCSE results, at some point they were able to do the things in the subjects they got, and can't even work out a percentage anymore. Give them a basic grounding; add up, divide, work out a percentage; and the rest? Not their problem. They're not going to learn it properly in the first place and it's questionable how much use they'd have out of it if they did.

The vast majority of the time spent on someone's education is just pointless filler subjects that do little more than punish someone with boredom and failure. Offering no economic or cultural benefit in return. Just try having a discussion with someone about the underlying causes of the Opium Wars, or the Boer Wars, or ask them why World War 1 started, or... Then try having a discussion with them about the religious practices of Buddhists, or Jews. There's a very limited set of living knowledge in most people - far beneath that which you'd expect just going off of exam results and taught subjects. The two should approach each other, and it seems to me the logical way to do this is to reduce taught knowledge unless an economic or cultural case can be made for attempting to run things in the other direction.

3) This ties into 2 but is a little different: We have utterly no respect for diversity. The downside of having a standardised grade system is that there's a cutoff point where investing more in a student stops being worthwhile. You have a student getting a B, do you focus on getting them up to an A or do you focus on getting the D student up to a C so that they count in your students getting A-C stats? You have a student getting an A, do you work to further engage them or do they just cease to be worth your time? It makes far more sense, under that incentive system, to focus that effort on the people who are under-performing - and who will probably not retain and go on to use the knowledge.

The consequence of having a set test is you have teaching set to the test. You have a space of things that you expect people to know, and they may fill it to various degrees but at the end of the day if you take a group of people that achieved good results, they're all going to know more or less the same stuff.

Strength in groups comes from diversity, new ways of looking at things, new questions, different answers. Over specialisation creates weaknesses - cultural blind-spots. If you know the same as me, then I don't need you as anything more than something to carry out my orders. You make me stronger only in so far as you're an instrument of my will. There's no point having a discussion with you, because you'd only be able to tell me what I already know.

Of course we all go on to live very different lives, so this effect becomes less pronounced with age. Nonetheless, it's a major screw up.

4) A lot of your success in the current education system seems to hinge on your ability to visualise yourself enjoying future rewards and the reinforcement you get at home. There seem likely to be differences in people's brains in terms of how well they can be motivated by the potential of future rewards and lots of people have really shitty home lives. Ideally the reinforcement would take place in the classroom as per 1.

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So, let's wool-gather a bit: In really broad strokes, what qualities would we like an education system to have?

Help every child achieve their own strengths.

Things that are immediately rewarding, preferably in the social sense.

Things that allow people to experience environmental mastery.

Some structure for people who lack the ability to self motivate.

So:
No set classes that someone has to be in.

No set subjects beyond the very basics.

Optional projects (preferably group projects) rather than tests.

How might that look?

A child goes into school and is presented with a number of groups that are running around projects at the time. Want to try building a robot? They try putting a robot together, discover they need to understand more about maths, go see the maths teacher. They need to learn more about programming, go see the programming teacher. They need to learn about machining, they go see the design teacher. And there's a teacher overseeing the project, sharing in their success, urging them on.

Under that sort of system teachers become more coaches and advisers than they are the current lecturers and punishers.

Or - a child can go into school and opt for more or less the current set up. The maths teacher isn't going to be advising all the time after all. There'd be more time to focus on those children who want more guidance in their education... though to a certain extent the requirements of projects would impose structure in the knowledge that people were obliged to seek out. (I'm honestly not sure this is good for people, you will have to self-direct when you get out of education, but I'm not sure enough to head it off completely and I don't see a point in ruling it out - you could adjust the system later if it turned out to be a poor use of resources / those people were massively disadvantaged.)

...

Objections?

But where will the money come from?

It's actually not clear to me that this would be more expensive than the current system. Resources are currently pretty cheap, infrastructure for making things for projects is a one time cost that when you average it out's going to be pretty much negligible. It's not clear you'd need to employ more teachers.

But what about bad teachers?

Well, they're a problem that the current system shares too. They're just more readily apparent in this system. Which is good. Hire, train and fire - if someone's not living up to expectations - should be a fairly quick cycle.

What you're essentially saying when you're worried about the quality of teachers under such a system is that a child is going to run into the limitations of what the teacher knows, or that the teacher's not going to be bothered to spend time on them. Which is either fantastic or extremely worrying, but in any case is a clear signal in a way that waiting until they get their GCSE results isn't.

But if people don't take tests how do we assess them for work?

Well, look, two years out the gate it doesn't make a dang bit of difference for most things that you might want to do what your education was. I'm a Philosopher by education. I've worked in public policy research, sales, programming.... What's important is what jobs you've had and how well you've done them. Education should be approached in the same way. What did you do and how well did you do it? Write about your education on your CV as if it were another job and list your achievements. Not only is it less perverse for you it tells the person reading the thing a lot more about you. Fifteen years of work should not be summed up as 'GCSEs including English A, Science A and Maths A.' But that's how I see it on a lot of CVs.

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Mind you, I'm not saying that a system you made up would look like this. There are probably a number of ways it could go, and a number of flaws that would need tuning. I'm just saying that if you start off thinking about how you'd teach people I end up in dramatically different places to the current school system - and consequently I'm not surprised in the least to learn that the school in OP's link doesn't seem to be doing any worse than comparable schools in the area. When you start looking at the paths not taken, it's like that for a lot of things.