Abstract
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.
Highlights
1.1 Why Value-added is UsedGovernments worldwide, education leaders, teachers and families would all like to be able to judge the performance of schools and teachers in terms of pupil attainment (Barber and Moursched 2007)
We downloaded the number of pupils per school at the end of their Key Stage 4 (KS4), and the figures for Key Stage 2 to KS4 contextualised value-added
There were a total of 4,015 secondary school or college entries on the DfE School Performance Website
Summary
Governments worldwide, education leaders, teachers and families would all like to be able to judge the performance of schools and teachers in terms of pupil attainment (Barber and Moursched 2007). They want to know how much schools and teachers contribute to pupil attainment, how well schools overcome differences between the socio-economic background of their intakes, and whether some schools are more effective than others with equivalent pupils. Where a school is sited, its specialism, organisation and precise methods of allocating places to pupils mean that there is considerable variation in school intakes, in terms of prior pupil learning, and indicators of possible disadvantage (Gorard and Cheng 2011)
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