How should we treat under-performing schools? A regression discontinuity analysis of school inspections in England

Rebecca Allen () and Simon Burgess ()

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

Abstract: School inspections are an important part of the accountability framework for education in England. In this paper we use a panel of schools to evaluate the effect of a school failing its inspection. We collect a decade’s worth of data on how schools are judged across a very large range of sub-criteria, alongside an overall judgement of effectiveness. We use this data within a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to model the impact of ‘just’ failing the inspection, relative to the impact of ‘just’ passing. This analysis is implemented using a time-series of school performance and pupil background data. Our results suggest that schools only just failing do see an improvement in scores over the following two to three years. The effect size is moderate to large at around 10% of a pupil-level standard deviation in test scores. We also show that this improvement occurs in core compulsory subjects, suggesting that this is not all the result of course entry gaming on the part of schools. There is little positive impact on lower ability pupils, with equally large effects for those in the middle and top end of the ability distribution.

Keywords: School inspection; school accountability; school attainment; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2012-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2012/wp287.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2012/wp287.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2012/wp287.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How should we treat under-performing schools? A regression discontinuity analysis of school inspections in England (2012)
Working Paper: How should we treat under-performing schools? A regression discontinuity analysis of school inspections in England (2010)
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:12/287

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 ().