David Jesson

Performance Assessment in the Education Sector: educational and economic perspectives

Abstract The growth in importance of performance assessment in education over recent years has been linked with a concern to ensure that the service represents ‘value for money’. To date the absence of a satisfactory analytical framework has meant that questions of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ have been kept separate. An additional problem has been that, whilst there are many different outcomes which are appropriate for education authorities to pursue, conventional models handle these only one at a time. In this paper we use data on the 96 English LEAs to show how an underlying model allows authorities to be compared in terms of ‘efficiency’ when facing different environmental circumstances and utilising different resource inputs. The technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is first described in the context of an explanatory model, and then the results of applying this to the English LEAs are presented. As distinct from a league table’ analysis, DEA gives some indications of where improvements ar...

Estimating Differences in the Examination Performances of Secondary Schools in Six LEAs: a multi‐level approach to school effectiveness

Abstract Examination results for fifth‐year pupils in six different local education authorities are analysed with a view to establishing what differences in their performance can be assigned to the schools they attend. Using multi‐level models it is shown that, whilst in general the differences between schools are relatively small, the actual size in examination points is certainly not trivial. These differences are estimated for the schools in each LEA. Distinctions are drawn between explanatory models based on information about pupils’ background as opposed to prior attainment; the latter are shown to be more appropriate for comparisons between schools. Amongst the 11 data sets analysed there was little evidence that schools were differentially effective with different groups of pupils.

The search for a fairer way of comparing schools’ examination results

Abstract The basic question we address in this paper is a straightforward one. How can ‘fairer’ comparisons be made between the results of individual secondary schools? This is a question which has preoccupied researchers of school effectiveness over much of the past decade. It is one, however, which has assumed still greater importance in the light of the recent requirement of the 1980 Education Act, in a climate of demands for greater ‘accountability’ in the public sector, that schools should publish their examination results. The paper explores some of the prevailing approaches to judging schools’ effectiveness, with particular reference to the use and interpretation of public examination results as measures of school performance, and utilizes data that have been collected from a small number of local education authorities to demonstrate the current ‘state‐of‐the‐art’. It concludes that although judgements about schools’ performance and effectiveness abound, appropriate frameworks for the comparison of...

Slants on Slopes: Using Multi‐level Models to Investigate Differential School Effectiveness and its Impact on Pupils’ Examination Results

ABSTRACT Does the influence on academic progress, which a school exerts on its pupils’ achievements in public examinations, differ for pupils of differing levels of ability? The study on which this paper is based used data from a number of English local education authorities (LEAs) and showed that, in general, when finely‐differentiated measures of pupils’ prior‐attainment were employed, the rate of progress was uniform for most schools within the differing sets for which data were available, whilst the level varied substantially between schools. The analysis contrasts these findings with others where a grouped prior‐attainment measure was used, and evidence for ‘differential effectiveness’ was detected; the paper seeks to account for the substantially different conclusions to which the work leads.

Changes and improvements in schools’ effectiveness: trends over five years

ABSTRACT It is widely assumed that some schools improve more rapidly than others. However, unlike the well‐established finding that schools differ in their effectiveness, evidence that schools improve at different rates is sparse. Using data on pupils’ examination results and prior achievements from five cohorts of pupils passing through over 30 schools in one LEA, the study considers three questions. First, the extent to which some schools improve more rapidly than others. Second, whether certain ‘types’ of school are more likely to improve. And third, whether there were any ‘strategies’ which substantial numbers of schools employed to bring about improvement. A multilevel model was employed to generate estimates of schools’ ‘effectiveness’ and ‘improvement over time’. The analysis showed that around 1 in 7 schools ‘improved rapidly’ over the 5‐year period. Both ‘less effective’ and ‘more effective’ schools’ improved. However, differences in schools’ effectiveness remained substantial when compared with ...

The negotiation and construction of performance indicators: Some principles, proposals and problems

Abstract For much of the eighties progress in the UK towards the establishment of comprehensive frameworks for judging schools’ performance has been patchy. In the late eighties, however, a variety of proposals have been made for remedying these deficiencies and the creation of systematic frameworks for performance evaluation look a realistic possibility for the coming decade. In this paper we explore some of the lessons to be learnt from previous efforts and the steps that will need to be taken if the education service is to avoid merely replicating the patchiness of the eighties on a grander scale.