I have been following the BERA Conference and read this extra-ordinary paper by Professor Stephen Gorard from Birmingham University.
I have included a short extract below...
"One clear finding that is now largely unremarked by academics and unused by policy-makers is that pupil prior attainment and background explain the vast majority of variation in school outcomes. This finding is clear because its scale and consistency over time and place dwarfs the error component in the calculation (largely because the error does not have a chance to propagate in the same way as for CVA analysis). Why is this not more clearly understood and disseminated by politicians? In England, we have built a system of maintained schools that remains loosely comprehensive and is funded quite equitably (more so than the USA, for example) on a per-pupil basis adjusted for special circumstances. The curriculum is largely similar (the National Curriculum) for ages 5–14 at least, taught by nationally-recognised teachers with Qualified Teacher Status, inspected by a national system (OFSTED) and assessed by standardised tests up to Key Stage 3. Education is compulsory for all and free at the point of delivery. In a very real sense it sounds as though it would not matter much which school a pupil attends, in terms of qualifications as an outcome. And indeed, that is what decades of research have shown is true.
Are parents and pupils being misled into thinking that which school they use does make a substantial difference? Perhaps, or perhaps qualifications at age 16 are not what parents and pupils are looking for when they think of a new school for a child aged 4 or even 10.16 School choice research suggests that what families are really looking for is safety and happiness for their children (Gorard, 1997). When thinking about moving a 10-year-old from a small primary school in which they are the oldest to a much larger, more distant secondary school with students up to the age of 19, security is often the major concern. This is why proximity can be seen as a rational choice. It is also possible that parents know perfectly well that raw scores are not an indication of the quality of the school attended but of the other pupils attending. Using raw scores might be a rational way for a lay person to identify a school in which learning was an important part of everyday school life. Raw scores, like bus stop behaviour, are used as a proxy indication of school intake.
If so, several conclusions might follow. Politicians could disseminate the truth that in terms of traditional school outcomes it makes little difference which school a pupil attends. This might reduce the allure of specialisms, selection by aptitude or attainment, faith-based schools and other needlessly divisive elements for a national school system. It could reduce the so-called premium on housing near to what are currently considered good schools and reduce the journey times to schools (since the nearest school would be as good as the furthest). All of this would be associated with a decline in socioeconomic and educational segregation between schools. Socio-economic status (SES) segregation between schools has been a rising problem in England since 1997 (Gorard, forthcoming a). Reduced segregation by attainment and by student background has many advantages both for schools and for wider society, as well as becoming a repeating cycle, making schools genuinely compre- hensive in intake as well as structure, so giving families even less reason to look beyond their nearest schools. It would also mean that, on current figures, no schools would be part of the National Challenge. Schools are earmarked for the National Challenge if their KS4 raw score benchmark of pupils attaining the equivalent of five good GCSEs is less than 30%. Since the overall national figure is considerably higher than 30%, the National Challenge is less an indication of poor schools and more an indictment of the levels of academic segregation in the system. Redistribut- ing school intakes solves the problem at a stroke.
Perhaps even more importantly, once policy-makers understand how CVA works and that they cannot legitimately use it to differentiate school performance, they may begin to question the dominance of the school effectiveness model more generally. We might see a resurgence of political and research interest in school processes and outcomes other than pencil-and-paper test results. Schools are mini-societies in which, according to surveys, pupils may learn how to interact, what to expect from wider society and how to judge fairness (Gorard & Smith, 2009). Schools seem to be a key influence on pupils’ desire to take part in future learning opportunities (Gorard et al., 2007) and on their occupational aspirations (Gorard & Rees, 2002). All of these outcomes have been largely ignored in three decades of school effectiveness research. It is time to move on."
If you want to read the whole paper you can visit the BERA Conference web-site at http://beraconference.co.uk/programme-at-a-glance/.