Abstract
Value‐added ‘Progress’ measures are to be introduced for all English schools in 2016 as ‘headline’ measures of school performance. This move comes despite research highlighting high levels of instability in value‐added measures and concerns about the omission of contextual variables in the planned measure. This article studies the impact of disregarding contextual factors, the stability of school scores across time and the consistency of value‐added performance for different cohorts within schools at a given point in time. The first two analyses replicate and extend previous studies using current data, confirming concerns about intake biases and showing that both secondary and primary level value‐added measures exhibit worrying levels of instability. The third analysis goes further by examining whether instability across time is likely to stem from differences between cohorts and whether measures based on a single cohort reflect school performance more generally. Combined, these analyses suggest a general problem of imprecision within value‐added estimates and that current policy use of value‐added is unjustified. Published school performance measures are likely to be profoundly misleading, in particular for those unfamiliar with the level of uncertainty in the estimates. The article closes by considering whether value‐added measures could and should be used by policy‐makers as measures of school performance.
Highlights
This article examines the fitness for purpose of the English value-added (VA) measures of school performance, bringing together results from several analyses
This study comes at an important time: VA ‘Progress’ measures are to be introduced as ‘headline’ measures of school performance in the 2016 performance tables at Key Stage 2–4 (KS2–4) (DfE, 2014b) and KS1–2 (DfE, 2016a)
The following school-level variables were included: special educational needs (SEN) (%), English as an additional language (EAL) (%), disadvantage as measured by free school meals eligibility and child looked after status (%), number of pupils in cohort, average cohort prior attainment, percentage of eligible pupils who are male and coverage as a percentage of eligible pupils
Summary
This article examines the fitness for purpose of the English value-added (VA) measures of school performance, bringing together results from several analyses. Evidence is presented regarding the level of observable bias in the current English school VA measure and the stability of this measure over time at both primary and secondary level. This study comes at an important time: VA ‘Progress’ measures are to be introduced as ‘headline’ measures of school performance in the 2016 performance tables at Key Stage 2–4 (KS2–4) (DfE, 2014b) and KS1–2 (DfE, 2016a). This move, for the first time, positions VA measures as the key performance indicators for English schools. The analyses in this article, show that the existing VA measure (2011–2015) exhibits marked
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