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Assessing the Variance in Pupil Attainment: How Important is the School Attended?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Wilkinson ,
Alex Bryson  and
Lucy Stokes
David Wilkinson*
Affiliation:
UCL and NIESR
Alex Bryson
Affiliation:
UCL, NIESR and IZA
Lucy Stokes
Affiliation:
NIESR
*
corresponding author, e-mail: d.wilkinson@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

We explore the variation in pupil attainment at the end of secondary schooling in England. The paper links data on all schools and all pupils within these schools to analyse the role of the school in accounting for this variation. We analyse a number of different indicators of pupil attainment including value added between the end of primary and secondary schooling and attainment levels at the end of secondary schooling. We examine indicators that were the focus of the school accounting framework as well as other indicators that were not directly part of how schools were assessed. We show that schools account for a minority of the variance in pupil attainment, and the extent of the variation accounted for by the school is sensitive to the measure of pupil attainment used. In addition, we find that the majority of the explained school-level variance in attainment is related to school composition. However, most of the variance in attainment remains unexplained, raising questions about what other factors contribute to the variation in school performance.

Keywords

schoolsschool performancepupil attainmentI21
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 243 , February 2018 , pp. R4 - R16
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

Acknowledgements: We thank the Nuffield Foundation (grant EDU/41926) for funding and members of the project advisory group, and participants at seminars at the Department for Education and NIESR for comments. The authors acknowledge the Department for Education (DfE) for granting access to data from the National Pupil Database and School Workforce Census. The views expressed are those of the authors, and all errors and omissions remain the authors' sole responsibility.

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