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

Deborah Wilson and Anete Piebalga ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: education; performance measures; ranking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp176.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp176.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp176.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/CMPO/workingpapers/wp176.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2007/wp176.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2007/wp176.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:07/176

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().