Tackling low educational achievement

This report examines the factors underlying low achievement in British education. It is important to find out why tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications. Low achievement at age 16 is associated with disadvantage and also a variety of outcomes by gender and ethnic group. Existing policies and practices within the educational system do not always help. Boys outnumber girls as low achievers by 20 per cent and white British boys comprise nearly half of all low achievers, while there are also achievement problems among some minority ethnic groups. The report addresses the ongoing debate about education policies in relation to reducing low achievement. The study uses the National Pupil Database and related data to examine four different measures of low achievement, and a profile of low achievement is offered. The report will be of interest to all those concerned with educational outcomes, including policymakers, education professionals, unions and the media

Making a difference in education: What the evidence says

Robert Cassen, Sandra McNally and Anna Vignoles write that, as regards reducing the social gap, there is evidence that points to good potential in redirecting educational spending. They also argue for introducing fewer policy initiatives into the education system without proper evaluation

The role of health in development

The basic needs strategy of development is directed toward helping poor nations meet requirements for adequate food, shelter, sanitation, health, and education; thus, health becomes an objective of development. At the same time, a basic needs strategy is most effective when viewed as a means to increase individual and national productivity, not merely as a welfare services program. Expenditures on health are considered as an investment in human resources, contributing to productive capacity, but empirical studies on the contribution of health to per capita economic growth are largely anecdotal, marred by poor design and insufficient data. A similarly perplexing problem is the extent to which improved health is the result of specific health program interventions as compared to improved economic and social conditions. Both are important, but their relative importance differs from country to country and from era to era. Better data and analysis are necessary, not only to elucidate the interrelationships between health and development, but to measure the costs and benefits of specific health interventions.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/23226/1/0000159.pd

Understanding low achievement in English schools

Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications in England. This paper seeks to build a fuller picture of Key Stage 4 low achievement and its correlates than available hitherto. We focus on three aspects. Firstly, the role of students’ personal characteristics, especially gender, ethnicity and past achievement, in explaining the incidence of low achievement at age 16. Secondly, we investigate the extent to which particular personal characteristics constitute direct risk factors for low achievement and the extent to which they lead to low achievement because of their correlation with unobserved school and neighborhood quality, i.e. the role of sorting into schools and neighborhoods of different quality. We suggest a method of calculating school quality (how effective a school is in helping its pupils to avoid low achievement) which is akin to the value-added concept, and examine which specific observed school characteristics predict this measure of ‘school quality’. Thirdly, the paper examines the relationship between school resources – particularly per pupil expenditure – and the avoidance of low achievement, exploiting the panel nature of the National Pupil Database. Going beyond simple discrete choice models, the paper employs school fixed effects regression to reduce endogeneity problems and employs panel data at the student level to analyse school resource effects. A number of interesting findings emerge about the correlates of low achievement and of school quality, and we consider the policy implications of our findings

Does Aid Work

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