Joint with Iftikhar Hussain, Birgitta Rabe and Imran Rasul
Multiple inputs determine children’s academic achievement. We study the interaction between family and school inputs by identifying the causal impact of information about school quality on parental time investment into children. Our setting is England, where credible information on school quality is provided by a nationwide school inspection regime. Schools are inspected at short notice, with school ratings using hard and soft information. As such soft information is not necessarily known to parents ex ante, inspection ratings provide news to parents that shifts parental beliefs about school quality, and hence their investment into their children. We study this using household panel data linked to administrative records on school performance and inspection ratings. Within the same academic year, we observe some households being interviewed pre school inspection, and others being interviewed post inspection. Treatment assignment is determined by a household’s survey date relative to the school inspection date, and shown to be as good as random. We find that parents receiving good news over school quality significantly decrease time investment into their children (relative to parents that will later receive such good news). Our data and design allow us to provide insights on the distributional and test score impacts of the nationwide inspections regime, through multiple margins of endogenous response of parents and children. Our findings highlight the importance of accounting for interlinked private responses by families to new public information on school quality.
Joint with Agnes Nairn and Deborah Wilson
Since the 1990s, in various parts of the world, some parents have been able to choose which school their child attends via a range of school choice mechanisms. With choice comes the incentive for schools to use marketing techniques to attract pupils. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on schools’ marketing that shows, first of all, that whilst the Education literature has produced research in this area, the Marketing literature has been almost completely silent. Marketing can, in principle, improve the match between education provision and the needs of a local market, community, or set of parents. However, the review finds limited evidence of substantive changes made by schools. Moreover, it shows how marketing can contribute to social division; divert educational resource and effort away from curricular enhancement; and can even be deceptive and misleading. The paper is a call to action for marketing scholars to begin research in this area and to policy makers to take a closer look at the social consequences of school marketing.
Education Economics
School choice can segregate schools by academic ability, income or ethnicity, but is this because of households’ choices, or constraints in access to good schools? We examine whether segregation is by choice, finding that households’ school choices are segregating in most areas. Through counterfactual simulation, we find that implementing a policy of ‘neighbourhood’ schools would, in contrast, reduce segregation in most areas, under the assumption that each household’s location is fixed. Policymakers require further evidence to weigh up the effects of school choice systems on sorting across schools and neighbourhoods, relative to potential efficiency benefits of school choice.
Joint with Simon Burgess and Richard Murphy
This paper examines how the removal of national pay scales, a common feature of public sector labor markets, affects productivity. We exploit a reform that compelled all schools in England to replace pay scales with school-designed performance related pay schemes. Using teacher-level data, we find that in response to the reform, schools in labor markets with better outside options for teachers have relatively higher teacher pay progression, spending on teachers, teacher retention and student performance. These effects are largest for schools with a more disadvantaged demographic. We conclude that centralized pay scales result in a misallocation of resources by preventing such schools from retaining their teachers.
Joint with Simon Burgess
Joint with Rebecca Allen and Chris Belfield
The prevalence of ‘pre‐service’ or ‘trainee’ teachers in schools is rising in England, driven by the expansion of school‐led routes to qualified teacher status and increasing demand for newly qualified teachers. This may have important implications for schools, which have historically been concerned with the impact of trainee teachers on their pupils’ attainment. There are, however, confounding factors which affect both the decision to host a trainee teacher and pupil attainment. We empirically model the impact of trainee teachers on contemporaneous pupil attainment in ‘high‐stakes’ exams, exploiting unique data combining national administrative data on pupil test scores with a survey of schools’ involvement with initial teacher training over multiple academic years. We use school fixed effects to account for time‐invariant school factors which may determine both schools’ teacher training decisions and pupil attainment. Counter to schools’ concerns, we find that pupil attainment in high‐stakes assessments, on average, is not significantly affected by the number of trainee teachers. This is an important empirical finding, as it suggests that the rapid expansion of school‐led teacher training is not likely to have a detrimental effect on pupil attainment in England, conditional on the set of schools that choose to engage with initial teacher training remaining similar: trainee teachers may still affect pupil attainment in schools that do not currently participate in initial teacher training, as these schools are typically more constrained.
Joint with Simon Burgess and Anna Vignoles
We study school choice in England using a new dataset containing the choices of all parents seeking a school place in state secondary schools. We provide new empirical evidence to inform how the school choice market functions, including the number of choices made, whether the nearest school is the first choice and the probability of an offer from the first choice school. These indicators show that school choice is actively used by many households in England. We use the rich data available to describe how choices vary by pupil, school and neighbourhood characteristics and how school choice is used differently by different groups and in different parts of the country. For the first time, we are able to present national data on how the school choices made by parents vary according to pupils’ ethnic group and across urban and rural areas. We show, contrary to some existing literature that has relied on smaller and less representative samples of parents and pupils, that school choices do not vary significantly by social background. We show that parents pro-actively use the choice system and present new evidence on the extent to which the current school admissions criteria that prioritise distance penalise poorer families.
BBC; The Guardian; The Conversation; Schools Week; Schools Week
Joint with Luke Sibieta
Should schools increase teachers’ salaries to improve pupil attainment? We study the potential implications of an individual school offering higher teacher salaries from within a fixed budget by exploiting a natural experiment that forces some schools within a local area to pay teachers according to higher salary scales, but does not offer any extra funding. We show schools follow this regulation and pay their teachers more. The characteristics of teachers are largely unaffected, but teachers at high pay schools are less likely to be absent. Teacher and assistant numbers are largely unchanged. Instead, schools balance their budgets by making sizeable reductions in other expenditures, particularly spending on equipment and services, amounting to around 4% of non-instructional spending. There is no evidence of any overall effect on pupil attainment, however. It is likely that positive effect of the natural experiment through teachers is almost exactly countered by the negative effects of reductions in other expenditure.
Joint with Simon Burgess, Anna Vignoles and Deborah Wilson
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.
Joint with Claire Crawford and Lorraine Dearden
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.
Joint with Simon Burgess
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 “nonblind” internal assessment to compare differences in these assessment methods between white and ethnic minority pupils. We find evidence that some ethnic groups are systematically underassessed relative to their white peers, while some are overassessed. 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.
Joint with Claire Crawford, Alissa Goodman and Robert Joyce
The proportion of children born to unmarried parents has risen dramatically over the past three decades; in 2010 just over three in ten of all live births in England and Wales were born to cohabiting couples. This significant change raises a number of important questions that cut across government policy areas and academic disciplines, perhaps the most fundamental of which is whether being born to cohabiting rather than married parents matters for children’s well-being. In this article we assess whether there are differences in early measures of cognitive and socio-emotional development between children born to cohabiting and married couples, and if so, whether marriage is the cause of these differences. We show that children born to married parents exhibit higher cognitive and socio-emotional development at ages 3 and 5, on average, than children born to cohabiting couples. We then adopt a systematic empirical approach to try to identify whether marriage is the cause of these differences, or whether they are in fact accounted for by other characteristics of the parents which happen to be correlated with marital status. As this empirical strategy involves some judgment on our part, we cannot claim a definitive answer. We do, however, regard our results as a strong indication that marriage plays a relatively small role, if any, in promoting children’s early cognitive or socio-emotional development.
Joint with Simon Burgess, Anna Vignoles and Deborah Wilson
This article focuses on the constraints on parental choice of school caused by geographical location, which arise due to the reliance on geographical proximity as the key oversubscription criterion for allocating school places. We investigate the assumption that most families really can choose between a range of different schools, and ask what types of school are genuinely accessible to different types of pupil. Using an innovative combination of survey and administrative data, we first determine what types of school are located near different family types. We then investigate how many of these different types of school are really available to the student, based on current catchment areas of schools and the home location of the child. This enables us to assess how access is determined by geography, and how it differs both by school type and by type of family. We show that using proximity as the main criterion to determine access to most schools affects pupils’ probability of securing a place at a particular school, with higher socio-economic status (SES) pupils being more likely to be accepted into (nearer) more advantaged schools. We argue that the large differences in the range of schools genuinely available to different families, coupled with the use of proximity as a tie-break device, continues to be a significant barrier to reducing inequality of access in the English school system.