What parents want: school preferences and school choice

Parental demand for academic performance is a key element in the view that strengthening school choice will drive up school performance. In this paper we analyse what parents look for in choosing schools. We assemble a unique dataset combining survey information on parents' choices plus a rich set of socio-economic characteristics; administrative data on school characteristics, admissions criteria and allocation rules; and spatial data attached to a pupil census to define the de facto set of schools available to each family in the survey. To achieve identification, we focus on cities where the school place allocation system is truth-revealing ("equal preferences"). We take great care in trying to capture the set of schools that each family could realistically choose from. We also look at a large subset of parents who continued living in the same house as before the child was born, to avoid endogenous house/school moves. We then model the choices made in terms of the characteristics of schools and families and the distances involved. School characteristics include measures of academic performance, school socio-economic and ethnic composition, and its faith school status. Initial results showed strong differences in the set of choices available to parents in different socio-economic positions. Our central analysis uses multinomial logistic regression to show that families do indeed value academic performance in schools. They also value school composition -- preferring schools with low fractions of children from poor families. We compute trade-offs between these characteristics as well as between these and distance travelled. We are able to compare these trade-offs for different families. Our results suggest that preferences do not vary greatly between different socio-economic groups once constraints are fully accounted for.school preferences, school choice, parental choice

Parental choice of primary school in England: what ‘type’ of school do parents choose?

We investigate the central premise of the theory of markets in education, namely that parents value academic standards. We ask what parents really want from schools and whether different types of parents have similar preferences. We examine parents’ stated preferences and revealed preferences for schools (their actual choice of school as opposed to what they say they value in a school). More educated and higher socio-economic status (SES) parents are more likely to cite academic standards, whilst less educated and lower SES parents are more likely to cite proximity. More advantaged parents choose better performing schools, particularly in areas with many schools and therefore a lot of potential school choice. More advantaged parents also choose schools with much lower proportions of pupils eligible for free school meals, relative to other schools available to them. Hence whilst parents do not admit to choosing schools on the basis of their social composition, this happens in practice. Most parents get their first choice of school (94%) and this holds both for more and less advantaged parents, though this is partially because poorer parents make more ‘realistic’, i.e. less ambitious, choices. If, in areas where there is a lot of potential competition between schools, more advantaged families have a higher chance of achieving their more ambitious choices that do poorer parents, this could tend to exacerbate social segregation in our schools.school preferences, school choice, parental choice

What Parents Want: School preferences and school choice

Parental demand for academic performance is a key element in the view that strengthening school choice will drive up school performance. In this paper we analyse what parents look for in choosing schools. We assemble a unique dataset combining survey information on parents’ choices plus a rich set of socio-economic characteristics; administrative data on school characteristics, admissions criteria and allocation rules; and spatial data attached to a pupil census to define the de facto set of schools available to each family in the survey. To achieve identification, we focus on cities where the school place allocation system is truth-revealing (“equal preferences”). We take great care in trying to capture the set of schools that each family could realistically choose from. We also look at a large subset of parents who continued living in the same house as before the child was born, to avoid endogenous house/school moves. We then model the choices made in terms of the characteristics of schools and families and the distances involved. School characteristics include measures of academic performance, school socio-economic and ethnic composition, and its faith school status. Initial results showed strong differences in the set of choices available to parents in different socio-economic positions. Our central analysis uses multinomial logistic regression to show that families do indeed value academic performance in schools. They also value school composition – preferring schools with low fractions of children from poor families. We compute trade-offs between these characteristics as well as between these and distance travelled. We are able to compare these trade-offs for different families. Our results suggest that preferences do not vary greatly between different socio-economic groups once constraints are fully accounted for.school preferences, school choice, parental choice

What Parents Want: School Preferences and School Choice

We investigate parents’ preferences for school attributes in a unique data set of survey, administrative, census and spatial data. Using a conditional logit, incorporating characteristics of households, schools and home–school distance, we show that most families have strong preferences for schools’ academic performance. Parents also value schools’ socio-economic composition and distance, which may limit the potential of school choice to improve academic standards. Most of the variation in preferences for school quality across socio-economic groups arises from differences in the quality of accessible schools rather than differences in parents’ preferences, although more advantaged parents have stronger preferences for academic performance

Mechanics and materials in the design of a buckling diaphragm wave energy converter

Not sure what acceptance date was so just used publication date

Supplementary information on early-stage floating offshore wind platform designs

This document serves as supplementary information to the authors' review paper on early-stage floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) platform designs. The review paper is the second part in a study on FOWT platform designs, following a review of FOWT platforms which currently have or have previously had a prototype, demonstration, or farm scale project at-sea. The present review covers 86 past and current early-stage platform designs, ranging from early conceptual designs to platforms which have undergone lab tests simulating extreme conditions. In this supplementary information document, more details are provided about all 86 platforms reviewed. For each device, the following is included (if available): (i) a description of the platform and its unique features, (ii) a rough timeline of development, (iii) design goals and constraints, (iv) evolution of the design, (v) lab testing information, and (vi) published dimensions. Two sections are included: one section contains the platforms that are no longer in development (i.e., there has been no new development since 2018), and the other section contains the platforms still in development today. Within each sub-section, platforms designed to hold a single turbine are presented first, then platforms designed to hold multiple turbines, and finally hybrid platforms

Calibration, Validation, and Analysis of an Empirical Algorithm for the Retrieval of Wave Spectra from HF Radar Sea Echo

AbstractThe accuracy of the wave products retrieved by a 12-MHz high-frequency (HF) phased-array radar is evaluated for a 5-month period. The two stations composing the system were deployed in 2011 to overlook the Wave Hub, a test site for marine renewable energy devices located on the southwestern coast of the United Kingdom. The system was conceived and configured to reduce the inaccuracies introduced by short time averaging and minimal overlap between stations, both associated with the most traditional HF radar deployments, whose primary activity is current measurement. Wave spectra were retrieved by an empirical algorithm distributed with Wellen Radars (WERA), which were calibrated using in situ measurements collected within the radar footprint. Evaluated through comparison against measurements acquired by three in situ devices, the results revealed estimates of significant wave height with nearly zero bias, linear correlations higher than 90%, and RMS errors that range from 29 to 44 cm. The relative error of wave energy period comparisons was within 10% for periods between 8 and 13 s, while both under- and overestimations were observed above and below that range, respectively. The validation demonstrated that when locally calibrated, the algorithm performs better than in its original form in all metrics considered. Observed discrepancies are mainly attributable to single-site estimations, antenna sidelobes, and the effect of the second-harmonic peaks of the Doppler spectrum.</jats:p