The direct and indirect effects of education policy on school and post school outcomes

Successive British governments since the early 1980s have introduced a host of educational policy reforms in an attempt to raise pupil performance at school. One of the most important educational policies in the secondary education sector was the specialist schools policy, which was introduced in 1994. Using data from the YCS for pupils who left school in either 2002 or 2004, a period of rapid expansion of the specialist schools programme, we seek to evaluate the effects of the policy. Unlike most previous work in this area we investigate the effects of the policy on test scores and truancy for pupils at school, but also assess whether the policy had direct and/or indirect effects on post-school outcomes, such as labour market status, wages and A-Level scores. We show that specialist schools did raise test scores during compusory schooling, and that the policy had a positive and statistically significant effect in raising the probability of employment. The evidence on A-level scores suggests a negative effect and, due to data limitations, no effect on wages is apparent. Although we stop short of claiming that our findings are causal, they do imply that policy makers need to take a more comprehensive view of the effects of education policies when trying to address whether they deliver value for money to the taxpayer

Funding, school specialisation and test scores:an evaluation of the specialist schools policy using matching models

We evaluate the effect on test scores of a UK education reform which has increased funding of schools and encouraged their specialisation in particular subject areas, enhancing pupil choice and competition between schools. Using several data sets, we apply cross-sectional and difference-in-differences matching models, to confront issues of the choice of an appropriate control group and different forms of selection bias. We demonstrate a statistically significant causal effect of the specialist schools policy on test score outcomes. The duration of specialisation matters, and we consistently find that the longer a school has been specialist the larger is the impact on test scores. We finally disentangle the funding effect from a specialisation effect, and the latter occurs yielding relatively large improvements in test scores in particular subjects

Worker absence and shirking : evidence from matched teacher-school data.

We utilise a unique matched teacher-school data set of absenteeism records to quantify the impact of group interaction on the absence behavior of primary and secondary teachers. To address problems of identification our study focuses on teachers who move between schools. The estimates for movers suggest that absenteeism is influenced by prevailing group absence behaviour at the school. Our finding suggests that a worker takes one more day of absenteeism if their average coworker takes 12 more days or 8 more days absenteeism per quarter for primary school and secondary school teachers, respectively. We interpret this as evidence that worker shirking is influenced by workplace absence norms

Relative pay and job satisfaction: some new evidence

This paper investigates the determinants of job satisfaction using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study. The determinants of interest include actual pay, relative pay, hours of work, job autonomy and several personal characteristics. We also investigate the determinants of satisfaction with pay conditional on a worker's satisfaction with other domains of job satisfaction, such as satisfaction with job security. We find that relative pay is statistically significant but that its effect on satisfaction with pay is relatively small. Job autonomy has a powerful influence on satisfaction with pay. So too does being black.JOB SATISFACTION WAGES AUTONOMY SECURITY

Navigation-by-music for pedestrians: an initial prototype and evaluation

Digital mobile music devices are phenomenally popular. The devices are becoming increasingly powerful with sophisticated interaction controls, powerful processors, vast onboard storage and network connectivity. While there are ‘obvious’ ways to exploit these advanced capabilities (such as wireless music download), here we consider a rather different application—pedestrian navigation. We report on a system (ONTRACK) that aims to guide listeners to their destinations by continuously adapting the spatial qualities of the music they are enjoying. Our field-trials indicate that even with a low-fidelity realisation of the concept, users can quite effectively navigate complicated routes

Testing theories of labour market matching

This paper estimates a model of two-sided search using micro-level data for a well-defined labour market. It examines the assumption of random matching and contrasts it with the stock-flow (or non-random) matching model of Coles and collaborators. Given a dataset of contacts, matches, and complete labour-market histories for both sides of the market, we estimate hazard functions for both (unemployed) job-seekers and vacancies. For job-seekers, the tests adds the stock of new vacancies to a standard job-seeker hazard which itself depends on the stocks of vacancies and unemployed. Our tentative results find very weak evidence of stock-flow matching.two-sided search, random matching, hazards

The Effect of a Tuition Fee Reform on the Risk of Drop Out from University in the UK

This paper investigates whether the increase in university tuition fees in 2006 changed student drop out behaviour. Using data on multiple cohorts of first year students who enrolled between 2003-2010, we estimate duration models controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. Our findings suggest that the policy reform reduced the hazard of dropping out by 16 percent, however, there were differences in the impact of the reform in terms of income groups, the type of university attended and the subject studied. The effect of the reform was not just a one off, but persisted for a number of years after 2006. Drop out behaviour in the post-reform period was also affected by the recession in 2008, and there may have been possible changes in the composition of the student population, which makes it difficult to quantify the full effect of the tuition fee increase. Finally, the tuition fee reform had a spillover effect on the drop out behaviour of Scottish students attending Scottish universities, a group exempt from the tuition fee reform

The effect of college mergers on student dropout behaviour:evidence from the UK

This paper investigates the effect of college merger on the probability of students dropping out of college. In addition we assess whether this effect persists over time and whether there is variation in the risk of drop out by programme area. To answer these questions we use a large administrative data set relating to the population of students enrolled in the further education sector for multiple cohorts of students (i.e. 2002-03 to 2007-08 cohorts). We employ the propensity score matching methods and difference-in-differences methods to overcome the fundamental evaluation problem and to remove the effect of unobserved student (and college) heterogeneity. Our evidence suggests that the risk of drop out has varied over time (by cohort), reducing the risk by about 1-2 percentage points for earlier cohorts, which contrasts with positive effects for later cohorts, which were as high as 5 percentage points. We also show that the effects of merger persisted for 1-2 years and that there was variation in the effect of a merger by programme area. Our results raise important implications for policy makers insofar as mergers cannot be unanimously assumed to be either negative or positive. The effect probably varies with the nature of the merger (voluntary versus involuntary) and by programme area regardless of the type of merger

Scheduling with Automatic Resolution of Conflicts

DSN Requirement Scheduler is a computer program that automatically schedules, reschedules, and resolves conflicts for allocations of resources of NASA s Deep Space Network (DSN) on the basis of ever-changing project requirements for DSN services. As used here, resources signifies, primarily, DSN antennas, ancillary equipment, and times during which they are available. Examples of project-required DSN services include arraying, segmentation, very-long-baseline interferometry, and multiple spacecraft per aperture. Requirements can include periodic reservations of specific or optional resources during specific time intervals or within ranges specified in terms of starting times and durations. This program is built on the Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment (ASPEN) software system (aspects of which have been described in previous NASA Tech Briefs articles), with customization to reflect requirements and constraints involved in allocation of DSN resources. Unlike prior DSN-resource- scheduling programs that make single passes through the requirements and require human intervention to resolve conflicts, this program makes repeated passes in a continuing search for all possible allocations, provides a best-effort solution at any time, and presents alternative solutions among which users can choose

Mechatronics & the cloud

Conventionally, the engineering design process has assumed that the design team is able to exercise control over all elements of the design, either directly or indirectly in the case of sub-systems through their specifications. The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that a design team’s ability to have control over all elements of a system is no longer the case, particularly as the actual system configuration may well be being dynamically reconfigured in real-time according to user (and vendor) context and need. Additionally, the integration of the Internet of Things with elements of Big Data means that information becomes a commodity to be autonomously traded by and between systems, again according to context and need, all of which has implications for the privacy of system users. The paper therefore considers the relationship between mechatronics and cloud-basedtechnologies in relation to issues such as the distribution of functionality and user privacy