The Limitations of using School League Tables to Inform School Choice

Leckie, George; Goldstein, Harvey

doi:10.1111/j.1467-985x.2009.00597.x

Cited by 143 publications

(159 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As Leckie and Goldstein (2009) and others have already noted, within a year or so the majority of a school's value-added score is unrelated to its prior VA. What this paper shows is that after five years, there is no clear relationship between the initial and eventual VA scores of a large number of schools. How volatile do VA scores have to be before we accept that they are meaningless with current datasets as well as useless or worse than useless for practical purposes?…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

How Unstable are ‘School Effects’ Assessed by a Value-Added Technique?

Gorard¹,

Hordósy²,

Siddiqui³

2012

IES

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This paper re-considers the widespread use of value-added approaches to estimate school ‘effects’, and shows the results to be very unstable over time. The paper uses as an example the contextualised value-added scores of all secondary schools in England. The study asks how many schools with at least 99% of their pupils included in the VA calculations, and with data for all years, had VA measures that were clearly positive for five years. The answer is - none. Whatever it is that VA is measuring, if it is measuring anything at all, it is not a consistent characteristic of schools. To find no schools with five successive years of positive VA means that parents could not use it as a way of judging how well their primary age children would do at age 16 in their future secondary school. Contextualised value-added (CVA) is used here for the calculations because there is good data covering five years that allows judgement of its consistency as a purported school characteristic. However, what is true of CVA is almost certainly true of VA approaches more generally, whether for schools, colleges, departments or individual teachers, in England and everywhere else. Until their problems have been resolved by further development to handle missing and erroneous data, value-added models should not be used in practice. Commentators, policy-makers, educators and families need to be warned. If value-added scores are as meaningless as they appear to be, there is a serious ethical issue wherever they have been or continue to be used to reward and punish schools or make policy decisions

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

How Unstable are ‘School Effects’ Assessed by a Value-Added Technique?

Gorard¹,

Hordósy²,

Siddiqui³

2012

IES

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“…Researchers have also been interested in documenting the number of pupils who gained Standard Grades at grades 1-3, particularly when attempting to make comparisons with the number of pupils who gained GCSE grades A* to C in the rest of the UK (Anderson et al, 2004). In England, five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C are a well-recognized benchmark employed in official statistics and social research (Leckie & Goldstein, 2009). There is no similar benchmark in Scotland.…”

Section: Measuring Standard Grade Outcomesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental socioeconomic influences on filial educational outcomes in Scotland: patterns of school-level educational performance using administrative data

Playford¹,

Gayle

Connelly

et al. 2016

Contemporary Social Science

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In Britain there have been manifest changes in the management and organisation of education, but despite these developments there are still persistent inequalities in pupils’ educational outcomes. These inequalities are consequential because school qualifications are known to influence both pupils’ immediate continuation in education, and their later educational and occupational outcomes. The Scottish school system is similar to the system in England and Wales but there are a distinctive set of qualifications. From the mid-1980s until 2013 the final years of compulsory schooling led up to Standard Grade qualifications. Standard Grades were similar to the General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) and are worthy of detailed sociological examination because they were the first major branching point in the Scottish education system. A specialist dataset using administrative records was constructed for this project. The dataset comprises young people who undertook Standard Grades in Scottish schools between 2007 and 2011, who were members of the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS). We analyse pupils’ subject-area outcomes using a latent variable modelling approach, and explore characteristics associated with the membership of latent educational groups. The analyses uncovered four main latent educational groups. One group had very positive outcomes and pupils were generally more socially advantaged; another group had very poor outcomes and were generally more socially disadvantaged. There were two ‘middle’ groups, which both had similar moderate overall Standard Grade outcomes, but notably different subject-area-level outcomes. We conclude that during school hours these pupils are unlikely to be found drinking Iron Brew WKD in their local parks or at home playing on their Xbox; however, they are also unlikely to be filling out university application forms in the next couple of years

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“…However there are small but significant differences in the organisation of curriculum and recruitment to advanced level mathematics. The place and power of the so called 'league table' in this performative work is now well documented (Brown, 1998;Goldstein & Woodhouse, 2000;Leckie & Goldstein, 2009) and the culture of management by numbers (Ozga, 2009) is deeply embedded in school culture and teacher identity. Ball's (2001Ball's ( , 2003 analysis of how the neoliberal technologies of markets, managerialism and performativity frame current educational practice is particularly pertinent as we shall show in our analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing learning trajectories: the case of 14–19 mathematics

Noyes

Sealey

2011

Educational Review

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In this paper we explore how mathematics department leaders manage curriculum (what is taught), teaching (how it is taught) and learner progression (what results) for 14-19 year olds. The background to the study is a range of national, and international, concerns about participation rates in university entrance level mathematics. Given the recommendation of the Smith Report (2004) that new pathways models be developed for 14-19 mathematics, this paper explores some of the strategies employed, and issues faced, by schools as they seek to maximise attainment and participation in mathematics. Following a thematic analysis of data from interviews with heads of department in fifteen schools we look in more depth at one school to see how it manages the mathematics learning trajectories of young people. The theme of performativity is all pervasive.

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The Limitations of using School League Tables to Inform School Choice

Cited by 143 publications

References 27 publications

How Unstable are ‘School Effects’ Assessed by a Value-Added Technique?

How Unstable are ‘School Effects’ Assessed by a Value-Added Technique?

Parental socioeconomic influences on filial educational outcomes in Scotland: patterns of school-level educational performance using administrative data

Managing learning trajectories: the case of 14–19 mathematics

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