Accurate performance measure but meaningless ranking exercise? An analysis of the English school league tables.

Parental choice among schools in England is informed by annually published school performance (league) tables. The 2006 league tables included a measure of contextual value added (CVA) for the first time. By explicitly accounting for the characteristics of a school’s intake, CVA should provide a more accurate measure of the impact a school has on its pupils’ progress, i.e. on school effectiveness. In this paper we use UK government administrative data to replicate CVA and other key performance measures in order to investigate the extent to which the current league tables provide the information necessary to support parental choice on the basis of school effectiveness. We find that while CVA does provide a more accurate measure of school performance or effectiveness, school rankings based on CVA are largely meaningless: almost half of English secondary schools are indistinguishable from the national average.education, performance measures, ranking

Segregation and the Attainment of Minority Ethnic Pupils in England

In this paper we ask whether ethnic segregation in schools and in neighbourhoods has a causal effect on differential school attainment. We ask two related but different questions. First, we look at the test score gap between White and minority ethnic students, separately for Black Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani ethnic groups. Second, we consider the absolute performance of students in each of these minority ethnic groups across cities with varying levels of segregation. We show that, in strong contrast to similar studies in the US, the test score gap is largely unaffected by segregation for any of the three groups we study, and we find no evidence of a negative impact of ethnic segregation on absolute attainment levels.ethnic segregation, schools