We investigate parents' preferences for school attributes in a unique data set of survey, administrative, census and spatial data. Using a conditional logit, incorporating characteristics of households, schools and home-school distance, we show that most families have strong preferences for schools' academic performance. Parents also value schools' socio-economic composition and distance, which may limit the potential of school choice to improve academic standards. Most of the variation in preferences for school quality across socio-economic groups arises from differences in the quality of accessible schools rather than differences in parents' preferences, although more advantaged parents have stronger preferences for academic performance.Strong parental demand for academic performance is a central element of the view that strengthening school choice will drive up school performance . As school choice is a widely endorsed school improvement policy, this assumption is also an important policy issue, and the academic and policy debates on school choice are both controversial and unresolved (Hoxby, 2003). We contribute to this debate by offering new evidence on the nature and heterogeneity of parents' preferences for schools. We address three key questions. First, what school attributes do families value? Is the school's academic attainment record important, or do other factors out-weigh it? Second, how much do preferences differ between families of different socio-economic status? Answering these questions helps to explain the disproportionate admission of children from poor families to academically low-performing schools (Burgess and Briggs, 2009). Finally, we provide evidence on the degree to which this arises through differences in preferences for school attributes as opposed to constraints caused by differences in the attributes of available accessible schools.To address these questions we assemble a unique data set. We use survey information on parents' primary school choices and a rich set of family socio-economic and neighbourhood characteristics. We link this to administrative data on the characteristics of schools, and the nature of the local school choice mechanism. To identify

We assess whether ethnic minority pupils are subject to low teacher expectations. We exploit the English testing system of "quasi-blind" externally marked tests and "non-blind" internal assessment to compare differences in these assessment methods between White and ethnic minority pupils. We find evidence that some ethnic groups are systematically "under-assessed" relative to their White peers, while some are "over-assessed". We propose a stereotype model in which a teacher's local experience of an ethnic group affects assessment of current pupils; this is supported by the data.

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Executive summaryIt is well known that children born at the start of the academic year tend to achieve better exam results, on average, than children born at the end of the academic year. This matters because educational attainment is known to have long-term consequences for a range of adult outcomes. But it is not only educational attainment that has long-lasting effects: there is a body of evidence that emphasises the significant effects that a whole range of skills and behaviours developed and exhibited during childhood may have on later outcomes. There is, however, relatively little evidence available on the extent to which month of birth is associated with many of these skills and behaviours, particularly in the UK.The aim of this report is to build on this relatively limited existing evidence base by identifying the effect of month of birth on a range of key skills and behaviours amongst young people growing up in England today, from birth through to early adulthood. This work will extend far beyond the scope of previous research in this area -in terms of both the range of skills and behaviours considered, and the ability to consider recent cohorts of children -enabling us to build up a more complete picture of the impact of month of birth on children's lives than has previously been possible. In particular, we consider month of birth differences in the following outcomes: national achievement test scores and post-compulsory education participation decisions;  other measures of cognitive skills, including British Ability Scale test scores;  parent, teacher and child perceptions of academic ability;  children's perceptions of their own well-being, including whether or not they have been bullied;  parent and teacher perceptions of children's socio-emotional development;  children's engagement in a range of risky behaviours.We also consider whether parents respond differently to children born in different months of the year, particularly in terms of the investments they make in their child's home learning environment.To do so, we use simple regression models including month of birth dummies (i.e. a series of variables indicating whether or not a child was born in a particular month, relative to being born in September) alongside controls for a range of individual and family background characteristics. Our analysis pieces together information from three UK cohort studies -the Millennium Cohort Study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England -to enable us to consider month of birth differences in these outcomes from birth through to early adulthood. All three data sets contain rich information on the skills and behaviours outlined above. They have also all been linked to administrative data on national achievement test scores, allowing us to compare month of birth differences amongst cohort members of these surveys with those based on national cohorts.In line with previous literature, we find evidence of large and significant differences be...

Previous research has found that children who are born later in the academic year have lower educational attainment, on average, than children who are born earlier in the year, especially at younger ages; much less is known about the mechanisms that drive this inequality. The paper uses two complementary identification strategies to estimate an upper bound of the effect of age at test by using rich data from two UK birth cohorts. We find that differences in the age at which cognitive skills are tested accounts for the vast majority of the difference in these outcomes between children who are born at different times of the year, whereas the combined effect of the other factors (age of starting school, length of schooling and relative age) is close to zero. This suggests that applying an age adjustment to national achievement test scores may be an appropriate policy response to overcome the penalty that is associated with being born later in the academic year. Age at test does not, however, explain all of the difference in children's view of their own scholastic competence. Age adjusting national achievement test scores may help to overcome differences in ability beliefs between children who are born at different times of the year, but our results suggest that additional policy responses may be required.