14 DAY TRIAL // Many parents today use league tables when selecting secondary schools for their children, but even more don't do so. A new research shows that taking this into account results in higher incomes for the kids later on in life.
According to the new research paper, parents can ensure that their children score better on their General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) tests by sending them to secondary schools that have good league tables.
Sending the young ones to random schools was associated with reduced benefits in the long-run.
The investigation was conducted by experts at the University of Bristol Center for Market and Public Organization (CMPO), who worked closely with colleagues from the Institute of Education (IOE), in London.
The team looked at more than 500,000 GCSE results, obtained by children who selected their schools in 2003, and took their exams in 2009.
“Parents should use GCSE performance information to choose schools. We find that using performance tables is better than choosing a local school at random,” say the lead researchers of the work.
The study was conducted by IOE expert Dr Rebecca Allen and by CMPO scientist professor Simon Burgess. The findings came as a shock to skeptics, say the researchers.
For a long time, people believed that the general results a school obtained in an exam were an indicator of the degree of training in the general population, and an indicator of a child's success in the future.
Old data also indicated that high ability students may have been attracted to schools with a good name, which may have in turn contributed to the fame that particular learning institution may have had.
Additional details of the investigation were presented in a paper called “Evaluating the provision of school performance information for school choice.”
“Another surprise is that the best GCSE performance information is only slightly more useful in school choice than knowing the average ability of pupils entering the school,” the authors of the research say.
“We believe that this is because the demographic profile of pupils strongly influences the school’s ability to attract high quality teachers, headteachers, governing bodies, unpaid volunteers, teaching assistants, and other resources,” they add.
“To be clear, our argument is not that school composition is all that matters directly and teaching quality not at all; rather, we argue that teaching quality matters a great deal, but that averaged over a number of years, this is strongly influenced by school composition,” the team concludes.