Choice is currently limited by capacity constraints. There is an insufficient expansion of new places thanks to the tight control of places by LEAs, restricted capital funding from government for new schools and the higher birth rate in recent years coupled with continued immigration. Regardless, HM Treasury need to be convinced that taxpayers’ money is being spent efficiently on maintaining spare capacity in schools – which is essential for choice to operate. This is doubtful, especially in straitened times.

But even where they can exercise a real choice, parents may not be using the optimum information to identify the best school in their area. Unless parents make informed choices, a market will not deliver better outcomes.

Parents tend to make their decision based on a mix of factors, but the proximity of the school to home and exam results are the most important. Most parents will use the proportion of pupils achieving 5A*-C GCSEs including English and Mathematics – as presented in league tables - when interpreting exam performance, as a way to judge how ‘good’ the school is. But is this “raw” measure a sound basis for making such an important decision? Good results may be a reflection of the aptitude of a school’s intake rather than evidence of great teaching.

That’s why the Value Added (VA) score is a better indicator of quality: it measures how pupils perform on average in their eight best GCSE subjects compared to their expected progress based on their Key Stage 2 results in English and Maths. In other words, the measure discounts prior attainment – the result of the child’s aptitude, home environment or previous school – allowing us to isolate how much value their secondary school added. If you’re looking for the school that is most likely to help your child fulfil its full potential at exam time, then the VA score is what you should focus on.

So are the raw scores a good indicator of school quality, as measured by value added? To investigate this, my colleague Nida Broughton and I extracted from the Department for Education performance tables the raw scores and VA scores of all comprehensives in England for which information is available for GCSEs taken in the 2011-2012 academic year. We looked at the correlation between the two measures: if raw scores are a good guide to school quality, we would expect to see a close relationship between the two. The results are presented below.

Read More

Read More

This morning’s growth figures are the latest set-piece dust-up on the Government’s growth strategy. And as innumerable pointy-heads have made clear, the positive or negative sign on the front of the growth figure is really only of political significance, given the uncertainty around it. The broad picture remains one of stagnation. So we remain where we’ve been for a long time, debating what to do to get growth going. Read More

A lot of nonsense has been talked about working age benefits. Yesterday, the chancellor argued that working age benefits were “unaffordable”. He and the Work and Pensions Secretary have been explicit that they think the Housing Benefit (HB) chunk of working age benefits is “completely out of control”, citing a huge rise in spending since 2000. So is the Government right about HB? Read More

What should George Osborne do next? In a pre-budget Newsnight interview last week, I was asked what the Chancellor could do in today’s budget to get the economy growing. Inevitably, any nuance was stripped out of my answer to set up a simple dichotomy between me as a fiscal activist, and City AM’s Allister Heath as a supply-sider. Read More

The Government’s new childcare voucher scheme is welcome news for many middle- and high-income parents with children under the age of five struggling with the high costs of childcare: polling by YouGov for the SMF that just as many these parents said they found it difficult to pay for childcare as parents on the lowest incomes. Read More

Today’s childcare announcements have been framed as essential to making it worthwhile for parents to move into work. Nick Clegg says that “many mums and dads simply can’t afford to work”. For parents in the lower half of the income distribution, it’s true that the cost of childcare makes a huge dent in the financial benefit working. So the decision to raise support for working parents on Universal Credit ‘equivalent to 85% of costs’ seems like a smart move. Read More

A little noticed piece of DWP research shows that four out of five claimants spent at least three quarters of the past four years off unemployment benefit. Read More

Yet again the average cost of childcare has risen above inflation over the past year. Daycare Trust’s annual survey finds that the average cost of a 25-hour nursery place for a child under the age of two is £108.51 a week. Considering gross average earnings stand at £445 a week, childcare eats into a huge proportion of household income. Families across the income spectrum are struggling. Read More

Yesterdays’ news was all about the 4G spectrum auction revenues coming in £1.2 billion under George Osborne’s estimate. Back in December, the expected 4G auction revenues were what allowed the Chancellor to declare that the deficit was going to fall in 2012-13, even if you excluded the flattering effects of one-off windfalls such as the transfer of the Royal Mail pension scheme and the quantitative easing income from the Bank of England. At the time, the fact that it all depended on the inclusion of spectrum auction revenues led to accusations that the Treasury was cooking the books. As it turns out, that argument is looking irrelevant. The deficit now looks set to overshoot last year’s by some £6bn – even the 4G receipts can’t save the Chancellor, it seems. Read More