Author Archives: simonburgess

What are Free Schools for?

As children start their lessons in the 24 Free Schools opening this week, a new experiment begins in English education. The founders and staff will have been working hard for this day over many months and no doubt all will wish the pupils and staff well. There has been a lot of political passion on both sides of the debate, but what is the significance of the Free Schools experiment likely to be?

It is not an experiment because of the “free” part – Free schools will enjoy essentially the same freedoms as Academies do. It is an experiment because now anyone can propose to set up a school, and attract the same per-pupil funding from the state as other local schools. Anyone can propose … but the vetting process to check whether the applicants are “fit and proper” to run a school is (rightly, in our view) so stringent that around 90% of the original applications were turned down.

Will the experiment work? Work for whom? The focus cannot just be on the 5000 or so pupils starting now, less than a twentieth of 1% of their cohort. If so, this would be an incredibly expensive and high profile way to change the education chances of such a small number.

The focus has to be on the systemic impacts of the reform. What impact will the new option of opening a Free School have on the local schools?

The main idea, the big hope for the policy, is that this will raise the “competitive threat” to under-performing local schools. Economists talk about market entry: the theory that the threat of new suppliers entering a market works to keep the incumbents efficient and responsive. Any un-served niches or excessive costs would draw in new companies to offer a better deal. Arguably, the prime function of the Free Schools experiment is to make the schools market “contestable”. This might sharpen the efforts of schools to raise their game to avoid losing their pupils to the new schools.

This might work. It is conceivable that really poorly performing schools may not wish to see their school supplanted by a new entrant, and push to raise attainment standards. But the UK evidence on the effects of competitive pressure on school effectiveness is not encouraging. Put at its best, there is only very weak evidence for small effects of competition. This is not true in every country, nor in every service in the UK, and there appear to be important market structural reasons why competition does not work to raise standards in schools.

This is not at all to say that all competitive mechanisms are pointless. Clearly any school system needs a strong policy for dealing with failing schools, something to act as a discipline on the performance of Headteachers and school governors. Free schools offer this in principle: in extremis, parents very dis-satisfied with their state school can opt out and set up their own school. But there are two reasons why Free Schools are unlikely to be the best answer to this. First, there are very significant set-up costs, both in time and energy from the founders, but also in the straightforward sense of acquiring premises. While currently these are being funded (very generously) by the government, this simply cannot continue if the policy matures and spreads. But secondly, it seems inconceivable that any local area with one Free School would be offered the resources for any others. So as discipline device, this is a one-shot game, not an on-going continued pressure on low performing schools, which is what is needed.

Despite the first rush of enthusiasm, it seems unlikely that Free Schools will act as a major stimulus to systemic higher performance. Perhaps the main problem was not the barriers to entry preventing many highly competent and motivated school-starters from setting up. In which case, we will need other policies to address poorly performing schools in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

There are other important potential systemic effects, interactions between Free Schools and their neighbouring schools.

The first is school admissions. Free Schools will take part in coordinated admissions and, although, like Academies, being their own admissions authority, they will have to adhere to the Admissions Code. The big issue is whether the founders have any special rights to get their own children into ‘their’ school. It may be that this is one aim of the clause in the new draft Admissions Code allowing schools to give admissions priority to the children of “staff”. This is a difficult issue: it is quite understandable that those putting in time and effort to set up a new school want to get their own children in. But there are dangers: if this becomes the norm, we have a new route for particular individuals to get their child into a good school, by founding or acquiring a stake in, a Free School. In any case, the admissions criteria and the highly related question of how to pass on a “stake” in a Free School need to be clarified.

Another important spill-over effect concerns funding. The on-going current expenditure of Free Schools is funded on the same basis as Academies, so is not much different from maintained schools (just differentiated by not having to pay the local authority for central services). But the capital funding is another matter. Funding the acquisition and refurbishment of premises, estimated by the DfE at £120m, has been a substantial drain on a much-reduced schools capital budget. The funding for Free Schools’ buildings is a direct diversion of funds from other capital funding projects, many in far more needy schools and disadvantaged areas than the Free Schools.

But finally what Free Schools are likely to offer is scope for pedagogical innovation. This will not always be the case – some of the groups setting up schools may have rather conservative ideas on what constitutes a good education. But others will likely be set up by innovators with radical ideas on how to teach.

So perhaps that’s what Free Schools will end up being for: not really working as a spur to higher standards but acting as incubators for radical new teaching ideas. Very valuable indeed, but perhaps not what everyone was expecting.

Revising the Draft School Admissions Code

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Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

From next week, officials in the Department for Education are going to be busy sifting through responses to the consultation exercise around the new School Admissions Code.

Two important issues in the proposed code relate to the priority given to school staff, and to random allocation. We believe that as they currently stand, these provisions will set back the goals that the Government has set for its education policy.

1. Prioritising the children of staff

Paragraph 1.33 of the code says: “If admissions authorities decide to give priority to children of staff, they must set out clearly in their admission arrangements how they will define staff and on what basis children will be prioritised.”

This suggests that admissions authorities are to be allowed to prioritise the children of staff, reversing the policy of recent Admissions Codes.

One group very likely to be included in most definitions of “staff” are teachers. For those teachers with children, this will add a new aspect to their decision on which school to seek a job at. Like many other parents, teachers will be keen for their children to attend high-performing schools.

Following the White Paper “The Importance of Teaching”, one of the leading education policy issues is how to attract the particularly effective teachers into the more challenging schools. Research evidence does not tell us whether teachers who are parents are on average more effective teachers, but there are two points to make:

This policy change will differentially increase the flow of applicants to high-performing schools. If the Headteachers of those schools are skilled at spotting effective teachers, then simply having access to a much bigger applicant pool will raise the average effectiveness of teachers the hired at those schools.
They are less likely to be novices, which is one of the few clear findings on teacher effectiveness, so in that sense alone teachers who are parents are likely to be more effective.

Given that, this policy change is very likely to work against any efforts to attract effective teachers to challenging schools, and thus set back the Government’s stated educational policy goals of narrowing the outcome gap between affluent and disadvantaged pupils.

The proposed code change will also complicate disciplinary procedures because firing a teacher from a school would also have implications for her/his children. This is likely to make it even less likely that headteachers will engage in robust performance management.

We know that any work-based privileges that are specific to particular establishments tend to cement people in that job and reduce turnover. Such privileges include health insurance, pension rights, and so on. This reduces labour mobility and typically will make the labour market less efficient. This proposed change will have the same effect in the teacher labour market as teachers will be less willing to move as it will disrupt their children’s education.

The core issue is where the most effective school staff work. It would clearly be in high-performing schools’ interests to define staff quite widely to attract highly motivated and effective governors and other staff. School leadership is key to excellent schools, ever more so as more schools become autonomous. If the children of governors were also prioritised for admission, then we would likely see an improvement in the quality of governors at high-performing schools and a decline at more challenging schools.

These points are about the effectiveness and efficiency of schools. There is also a fairness point about equity of access to high-performing schools. Some schools might define “staff” quite widely to include Teaching Assistants, lunchtime supervisors, and governors as well as teachers. In such cases, becoming one of those staff is an attractive route of access into the school, as an alternative to buying a nearby house. In extreme circumstances, individuals could offer to work for free as lunchtime supervisors, or could offer to provide goods or services to the school to become governors. While many may apply for such positions, schools will naturally choose the more able and articulate applicants, particularly those with a professional background. This will not help to foster more equal access to high-performing schools.

It may be that the provision to allow this prioritisation of staff was a way of finessing the problem of how to guarantee that the founders of free schools can get their children into ‘their’ school. If so, it might solve a problem affecting possibly 5% of pupils at the cost of the problems outlined here for the rest.

2. Random allocation

Paragraph 1.28 says “Local authorities must not use random allocation as the principal oversubscription criterion for allocating places at all the schools in the area for which they are the admission authority.”

This paragraph bans the use of lotteries as the main mechanism for resolving over-subscription across an LA. The problem of who is admitted to the high-performing over-subscribed schools is highly relevant to the Government’s goal of closing the outcome gaps between affluent and disadvantaged pupils.

The Government has stated that the primary goal of its social policy is to raise social mobility. One of the central ways in which where you were born influences your life chances is through the assignment of children to schools, governed by the Admissions Code.

Currently, the main mechanism to resolve over-subscription is proximity. It is clear that the widespread use of the proximity rule widens the socio-economic gap in the available quality of schooling. In fact, the gap in accessible school quality between rich and poor families widens by over 50% once a proximity criterion is imposed.

We can illustrate this straightforwardly, using data from the annual Census of all state school pupils in England. We can approximate the neighbourhood of a pupil as the area within 3km of her home, and calculate the average difference in the academic performance of schools in the neighbourhood of poor and rich pupils. As we would expect, more affluent families tend to live in neighbourhoods with higher quality schools. We can also use the database to estimate an approximate proximity criterion, and to look at the schools that a particular pupil could reasonably expect to be admitted to. The difference in school “quality” is now much starker, over 50% higher in fact. This is the impact of the proximity rule, and operates over and above the simple fact that rich and poor live in different places.

This shows the mean academic quality of primary school attended (measured by the mean Keystage 2 score achieved in that school) available to high and low socio-economic status (SES) families in England. ‘Neighbourhood’ is defined simply as an area within 3km of the student’s house; ‘Catchment’ is defined as schools that the student would have a very high chance of getting into based on residential location and the school ’s catchment area. Standard error bars are displayed on the levels.

Clearly some criterion has to be used to resolve over-subscription. One possibility for use in cities is a lottery. But by its very nature, a lottery ensures that places are allocated in a way that ignores social background. All those families who have applied to an over-subscribed school are entered into a ballot, and as many names are drawn out as there are free places available (that is, once looked-after children, children with special educational needs, and siblings of current pupils have been assigned slots).

It is clear that lotteries are not a panacea and are not without difficulties, as our own research has shown. However, they do offer one potentially important way of raising social mobility.

We wait to see which way the new Admissions Code turns in the end.

Reforming school performance tables

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Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

Yesterday the Government published its response to the Wolf Review on Vocational Education. The Response sets out a number of proposals, accepting all of the Review’s recommendations. These include the eye-catching scheme to ensure that young people who do not achieve C grade in English and maths at age 16 continue studying them to age 19.

The response also proposes reforms to school performance tables. This is based on a recognition that schools’ behaviour in selecting qualifications for their students is strongly influenced by the incentive structure they face. A crucial component of this structure is the published school performance tables. These tables are important in influencing parental choice of school, and school leadership teams pay them a lot of attention.

From this year, the content of the performance tables will change quite significantly. The long-standing measure of the percentage of students achieving at least 5 A* to C grades will be retained. But in addition, a differential average points score will be published for each school, which provides information on how well the school does for students at the lower and upper ends of the ability distribution, as well as at the average:

“It is vital that performance indicators do not inadvertently cause schools to concentrate on particular groups of pupils at the expense of others. To avoid this we will continue to include performance measures, like average point scores, which capture the full range of outcomes for pupils of all abilities. In addition, from 2011 the performance tables will show for each school the variation in performance of low attaining pupils, high attaining pupils and those performing as expected.” (Wolf Review of Vocational Education, Government Response, p. 6).

This is a step forward. In our analysis we argued for exactly this measure: average GCSE points score, presented at three points in the ability distribution, low ability, average and high ability. Our criteria were functionality of the performance measure, relevance to parents and also comprehensibility. A measure is relevant if it informs parents about the performance of children very similar to their own in ability and social characteristics. It is comprehensible if it is given to them in a metric that they can meaningfully interpret. It is functional if it helps parents to answer the question: “In which feasible choice school will my child achieve the highest exam score?”. Overall, this performance measure came out on top. We also described ways that the information could best be displayed for parents: paper-based and web-based delivery mechanisms.

A second issue is that the “price” or GCSE-equivalent points of the new vocational exams seems set to change. Precise details of this are unclear at the moment. It is worth making the point again that schools will have an eye on the performance table impact of courses they offer to students. If vocational qualifications are to be worth less than they are at present receive, there is a danger that schools will not be keen to promote them to students who may be unlikely to score highly on more academic courses. In turn, this may make schools less keen to accept low ability pupils.

Of course, the old league table measure of percentage with 5 A* to C grades is staying. Perhaps there is a performance management version of Gresham’s Law and good performance measures will drive out bad ones. If parents come to rely more on this measure, the media will give it more prominence and the grip of the “%5A-C” measure on the public mind will finally begin to weaken.

Who is Aiming High?

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Simon Burgess

What do you hope for in life? More specifically – and perhaps more mundanely – what did you hope for educationally? Were you always intent on going to university? Determined to leave school as soon as you could?

Students’ aspirations now feature in current education policy debates. This has formed an important part of the debate on social mobility. It is generally believed that having high aspirations is an important factor behind good performance in school. Whether it then follows that it is a good policy idea to attempt to raise students’ aspirations across the board is less obvious, but that is not the subject of this comment.

How are aspirations formed? Why do some students have higher aspirations than others? To make things concrete, one of the first big decisions that students have to make is whether to stay on at school at 16. Students continuing in school open up the possibility of university and a graduate career. Finishing education as soon as possible closes those possibilities down, at least in a straightforward way.

We can see a few straightforward patterns from a simple data analysis.

We studied responses to the question: ‘What do you want to do when you are 16?’ in the Next Steps dataset. The question was asked of 14 year olds in schools in England, and we focus on the simple distinction of whether they wanted to carry on at school or not. Figure 1 shows some simple raw means of educational aspirations by ethnicity and gender.

Figure 1: Percentages Aspiring to Stay at School at 16

The first point to note is that staying on at school is by far the most common aspiration for both male and female pupils across all ethnic groups.

Within this there are, however, huge differences between the different ethnic groups. For female pupils there is a ten point gap between White students at 85% and the South Asian and Black Caribbean groups at 94 or 95%. The proportion of Black African girls wanting to stay on at school is even higher, at 99%.

There is generally a similar pattern for male students across the ethnic groups. Again, over 90% of boys in the South Asian and Black African groups want to stay on, and again the proportion of White boys staying on is the lowest of all the ethnic groups at only 73%. Black Caribbean boys display a slightly higher proportion on average, at 81%.

It is interesting to briefly note that the aspirations of the respondents in this survey reflect actual activity at the age of 16 of a previous cohort: a higher percentage of students from Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black African heritages stay on at school than do white British students.

Very similar large ethnic differences can be found in the students’ views regarding how likely it is that they will apply to university.

What influences this decision? Clearly, a full answer to this would involve a number of approaches including at least psychology and sociology as well as economics. Research evidence, including our own, suggests that the student’s prior attainment matters (the more able have higher aspirations), and that more broadly the students’ perceptions of their talent also matters; this is called “academic self-concept”. Some aspects of family circumstances matter, for example the qualifications of the students’ parents are correlated with their child’s aspirations, and some studies find that community or neighbourhood factors also matter.

However, the most important single factor is the aspirations of the student’s parents. Parental aspirations are a very strong correlate: 89% of students whose parents want them to stay on at school express the same wish.

The overall average hides differences across ethnic groups, however. In Figure 2 we plot differences in parental aspirations and differences in the students’ aspirations conditional on their parents’ views for each ethnic group in our sample. The group percentages of parents wanting their children to stay on at school are displayed along the horizontal axis. The vertical axis shows the group percentages of students wanting to stay on specifically for the group of students whose parents also want this. The figure illustrates the great disparity in parental aspirations between White and Mixed White-Black Caribbean and the South Asian groups.

There are marked differences in parental aspirations across the groups: just under 60% of low-income White boys’ parents want their sons to stay on at school, compared to around 90% or over for Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black African boys. There are high parental aspirations within these ethnic groups across the income distribution.

Figure 2: Student and Parent Aspirations

It seems that the passing on of high aspirations from parents to children is another dimension of the complex and multi-faceted transmission of opportunities and assets from one generation to the next.

Are school league tables any use to parents?

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Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

Today is “school league tables” day. Performance tables are released for schools and colleges in England, reporting a number of different measures of the exam performance of their students. While much attention this year will focus on the reporting of the new “English Baccalaureate”, we ask a more fundamental question: are school league tables in general any use to parents? One of the major aims for school league tables is to support and inform parents in choosing a school for their child: but are they fit for this purpose? The answer is “yes” – we show that using school league tables does help parents to identify the school in which their own specific child will do best in her future exams.

Parents consistently rank academic standards as being one of the most important criteria for choosing a school. The performance tables provide outcome measures that are very widely reported and easy to get hold of. The idea is that parents can scrutinise the results and weigh up the merits of the local schools, considering the academic performance, travel distance, the child’s own wishes and other factors before deciding which schools to write down on their application form.

But this idea has been subject to a number of critiques. There are three main lines of argument. First, it is argued that differences in raw exam performance largely reflect differences in school composition; they do not reflect teaching quality and so are not informative about how one particular child might do at a school. Second, schools might be differentially effective so that even measures of average teaching quality or test score gains may be misleading for students at either end of the ability distribution. Different school practices and resources might be more important for gifted students or others for low ability. Third, it is argued that the scores reported in performance tables are so variable over time that they cannot be reliably used to predict a student’s future performance. After all, today’s league tables reflect last year’s students’ exams, but a parent wants to know how her child will do in five years time.

It is an empirical question how quantitatively important these points are: are league tables helpful or not? The question on academic standards that parents want answered is: “In which feasible choice school will my child achieve the highest exam score?”. We argue that the best content for school performance tables is the statistic that best answers this question.

To answer this question, we use the long run of pupil data now available to researchers. We can follow students through their years at secondary school and see how they did in the exams at the end; that is standard. But we can also use statistical procedures (details) to estimate the counter-factuals of how that student would have done if s/he had gone to a different local school. We can then ask: if families had picked schools according to the league table information available at the time, would that have turned out to have been a good choice in terms of subsequent exam performance for that specific child? Focussing on the simplest measure of the school’s %5A*-C score, the results show that while it certainly does not produce a good choice for everyone, it produces a good choice for twice as many students than it produces a poor choice for. So on average, a family using the schools’ %5A*-C scores from the league tables to help identify a school that would be good academically for their child will do much better than the same family ignoring the league table information.

So are the league tables useful for parents? Definitely. Can they be improved? Certainly. The measures included in the performance tables should be judged according to their functionality, relevance, and comprehensibility. The test of functionality is the analysis just described. A measure is relevant if it informs parents about the performance of children very similar to their own in ability and social characteristics. It is comprehensible if it is given to them in a metric that they can meaningfully interpret. In fact, none of the current leading performance measures score very well across our three criteria. We have proposed an alternative measure that performs better on these criteria. No measure can be perfect because there are important trade-offs between relevance, functionality and comprehensibility: the more disaggregate the form in which performance tables are provided (increased relevance), the less precision they will have (decreased functionality). The more factors are taken into account in describing school performance for one specific child (increased relevance), the more complex the reported measure will be (decreased comprehensibility). Any choice on the content of league table information has to make decisions on these trade-offs.

Response to Education White Paper I: Teachers and teaching

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Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

The focus of the new Education White Paper (WP) is advertised in the title: “The Importance of Teaching”. Teachers are rightly lauded as the most important single factor in creating a good education. The reforms relate principally to training new teachers, with additional discussion of the constraints and bureaucracy that teachers face. The White Paper calls for shifting the emphasis of teacher training from university-based to school-based training, the argument being that this is where the “craft” of teaching is better learnt, and that this will generate more effective teachers.

We believe that the WP presumes more robust evidence on this issue than actually exists. It is hard to legislate on the best way to train teachers when we are not really sure what makes a good teacher, or what effective teachers do. We need to be realistic in terms of what we know, and also in terms of the wider context around teacher development.

There are a number of prior questions that need more robust answers than they currently have to properly address this policy issue. For example: To what extent are good teachers born or made? What do effective teachers do? What motivates teachers? We discuss new teachers first and then existing teachers.

The two key issues around new teachers are recruitment and training. The research evidence suggests that the recruitment of teachers matters a great deal. This evidence can be used to design the ideal personnel policy, the ideal contract for teachers. The facts are that teachers are very different in effectiveness but that this is hard to spot pre-hire as it does not appear to be well correlated with characteristics such as degree class or subject; and that this level of effectiveness tends not to increase with experience after the first two or three years. The current teacher entry system involves making the sharpest selection before training (to be raised to a good university degree), giving training, but thereafter only mild selection: that is, most people pass their training, and then passing probation (achieving QTS) is relatively straightforward in most schools. The evidence suggests a better policy would be exactly the reverse: a much more open and inclusive approach to who can begin teacher training, coupled with a much tougher probationary policy.

It is hard to give strong advice about a model for teacher training, given only a sketchy idea of how effective teachers operate. But in practical terms, students on teacher training courses already spend about two thirds of their time in school rather than in the university lecture hall; the scope for major gains from further time in school does not seem large. Furthermore, a timely OFSTED report on initial teacher training found more outstanding university-based teacher training courses than outstanding school-based ones. The implications for schools of taking a larger role in teacher training also need some consideration, particularly given the squeeze in resources that is coming.

There are about 400,000 teachers in England, and the turnover is about 20,000 per year. So even if the average effectiveness of new teachers can be significantly improved, this will only have a marginal impact on overall effectiveness for at least a decade. Increasing the effectiveness of existing teachers offers much greater scope for rapid improvements in standards.

The counter-part to focussing initial training on schools is to emphasise and enhance training on the job, continuing professional development (CPD). The picture painted by the economics evidence suggests a model of informal, small-scale, within-school or even within-department groups would work well, with colleagues learning from the most effective teachers. Whilst CPD is discussed at some length in the WP, it has not been the focus of interest and discussion that it should be.

The broader question is why this has to be pushed towards teachers, why there isn’t much of a demand for it from most teachers. Raising the value of being an effective teacher might help fuel this demand. We know that teachers do raise their teaching effort given incentives, and it seems likely that they would also be keener to invest in their own capability to be effective. This incentivisation could be very simple and need not be personal financial gain. It could be simple pride and satisfaction from being top of a list of teachers in the staff room, or additional resources for a project chosen by the teacher, or it could be a pay bonus for the teacher.

The focus on teachers and teacher effectiveness is to be applauded. It is less clear that the right policies have been selected to enhance this.

“Systemic failure” in Welsh Education

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Simon Burgess

The release this week of the latest round of international comparative education results produced some fascinating results. Not least of these was the outcome for Wales, characterised by the Wales’ Education Minister as alarming and “unacceptable”.

The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results derive from a standardised international assessment of 15-year-olds, run by the OECD. They show that Wales has fallen further behind since the last tests in 2006, and scored worse than before in each of reading, maths and science. Scores in Wales have fallen relative to England and are now “cast adrift from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland”. The Wales Education Minister, Leighton Andrews, described the results as reflecting “systemic failure”.

What might that systemic failure be? One leading candidate is highlighted in our recent research on accountability mechanisms for state schools. We argue that the decision in 2001 by the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) to stop the publication of school performance tables or “league tables” has resulted in a significant deterioration in GCSE performance in Wales. The effect is sizeable and statistically significant. It amounts to around 2 GCSE grades per pupil per year; that is, achieving a grade D rather than a B in one subject. This is a substantial effect, equivalent to the impact of raising class size from 30 to 38 pupils.

Although our results are based on a study of the GCSE scores school-by-school, Figure 1 gives a very stark impression of the overall effect. Students in England and Wales were performing very similarly up to 2001, but thereafter the fraction gaining 5 good passes has strongly diverged.

We take each secondary school in Wales, and match it up to a very similar school in England. This “matching” is based on pupils’ prior attainment, neighbourhood poverty and school funding among other factors. We then track the progress (or value added) students make in these schools before and after the league tables reform, comparing the Welsh school with its English match. Our analysis explicitly takes account of the differential funding of schools in England and Wales, and the greater poverty rates found in neighbourhoods in Wales.

Why should the removal of school league tables lead to a fall in school performance? Part of the effect is though the removal of information to support parental choice of school. The performance tables allow parents to identify and then apply to the higher scoring schools, and to identify and perhaps avoid the low scoring schools. This lack of applications puts pressure on the latter schools to improve. But this is not all of the story. Perhaps as important is the simple public scrutiny of performance, and in particular the public identification of the low scoring schools. This “naming and shaming” means that low scoring schools in England are under great pressure to improve, whereas the same schools in Wales are more able to hide and to coast.

Our work has attracted criticism, including a charge of using an “ideological theory” from teacher unions . A more thoughtful critic has accused us of a “howler” in the analysis: not noting the introduction of the original GCSE-equivalent qualifications. In fact, since these were introduced equivalently in both countries they simply net out of the comparison.

Responding to our research, the Welsh Assembly Government said “wait for the PISA results”. These results are now in, and do not make happy reading. No doubt there are many factors underlying the relative performance of Wales and England, but the diminution of public accountability for the country’s schools is surely one of them.

Where do star teachers come from?

Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess

This Sunday sees the culmination of the National Teachers Awards weekend, with a televised presentation of prizes. This seems very appropriate – in terms of the impact on learning outcomes, hardly anything matters as much as having a good teacher. This is not an empty platitude – research shows that the effect size of having effective versus ineffective teachers is very large relative to most educational interventions. For example, in terms of higher grades achieved, having more effective teachers beats smaller class sizes.

So where do good teachers come from? Are they born or are they made? Research undertaken here and in the US can throw some light on this.

First, the evidence shows convincingly that being a good teacher does not come with experience. Student progress improves for the first two years of a teacher’s career, but not thereafter. It seems that, after the first two years at least, good teachers have always been good teachers.

Second, having the kind of intelligence that is measured by a good university degree really doesn’t matter. CMPO evidence for England shows that a teacher’s effectiveness was uncorrelated with the degree class that s/he obtained. This finding mirrors others from the US: the skills needed to be a great teacher are just different to those needed to pass degree exams. The best teachers perform well across age ranges and abilities of pupils, and are capable of showing regard for the student perspective, which highlights why cognitive skills are not particularly important.

Some recent intriguing evidence from the US correlates teaching styles with the new measures of teacher effectiveness used by economists. If supported by further studies, this offers the hope that researchers can identify how good teachers teach and emphasise these elements in teacher training. Before that time, good teachers are essentially born not made.

More generally, it seems that picking a good teacher pre-hire is hard. Writing in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell asked ‘Who do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?’. He described the teaching profession as: “There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired.” US economists Kane and Staiger suggest that we need to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. Gladwell suggests that, given cognitive skills are relatively unimportant, we should lower entry standards to “having a pulse and a basic college education”. As he says: “We should be lowering [standards], because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.”

We should rightly celebrate the star teachers, even if we don’t know much about how we found them, or how to make some more.

Paying to fail?

Simon Burgess

Today, a very special education policy experiment was revealed.

In the past, policies have been introduced aiming to incentivise schools and teachers to raise educational attainment. These have been effective to a degree: our evidence shows that performance pay for teachers does raise educational attainment; competition among schools also has some impact, albeit much weaker.

This new policy incentivises students themselves. And in a break from past policies, this scheme directly incentivises students to fail their exams. It is reported that Blackburn College will pay £5000 to each student who fails her/his exams. This intriguing new policy will certainly add to the research evidence on how (not) to raise attainment.

This issue is taken seriously in the US with a number of landmark policy experiments raising attainment for some of the more deprived and low-attaining groups in the country. At Harvard, Roland Fryer reports on the results of a large scale experiment in which students were incentivised in different ways. In some schools students were paid on results, and in some schools they were paid for activities leading towards better results, such as attendance and completing homework. The results were mixed, but the latter class of experiments were effective and cost-effective. Similarly, C. Kirabo Jackson at Cornell has shown that the Advanced Placement Incentive Program in Texas produced some very exciting results from paying 12^th grade students for test-passing scores. Such students are more likely to attend college, do better when they attend college and are less likely to drop out. Similar experiments have taken place in the Harlem Children’s Zone

These experiments give us an idea of the value of a policy to incentivise student achievement. As far as I know, Blackburn’s policy is the first chance we have had to study the value of a policy to incentivise student failure.

More seriously, the idea of a commitment device is standard: something that penalises the provider if something does not work out as planned. A long warranty on a car is one way of the manufacturer raising the cost to itself of the car failing. But in a case such as studying for exams, where student effort is so hard to observe, and where good or bad luck can play such a role, what economists call the “moral hazard” problem is very severe.

There are obvious alternatives – the College could pledge to give £5000 to a local charity for every student that fails the exam. That would still appropriately hurt the provider for failure on their part, without giving marginal students a very high temptation for failing at the last.

The Browne Review and Incentives for Teaching in Universities

Simon Burgess

Incentives matter. Our research has shown repeatedly that this is true for the public sector as it is for the private sector: for teachers and schools, for doctors and hospitals and for civil servants. It is very likely also to be true for universities and those of us who work in them.

For the past couple of decades, universities have been very strongly incentivised to improve their research profiles. The evolving formats of the Research Assessment Exercise (now the Research Excellence Framework) have rewarded Departments and universities on the basis of their research output in a high powered way. This has been ferociously effective. As a whole, UK universities have vastly improved the quality and quantity of their research and now stand close to the very top of the international rankings.

One key insight is that while the RAE/REF itself is a collective Department-level incentive, this has trickled down to incentives for individual lecturers and professors. Universities keen to improve their research rating have created a “transfer market” for star researchers, and this has meant that recruitment effort, salary and respect have been focussed overwhelmingly on research ability. Young academics, wanting to get on, are aware of this and so spend their scarce time and energy on research.

This is not necessarily a bad thing – research is extremely important to a nation’s prosperity and cultural wealth. But it does mean that universities and individual academics have been incentivised to spend more time and resources on research than teaching. Does the Browne Review change any of this?

One of the less discussed points in the Browne Review is that new institutions can provide higher education (HE). Obviously, a new start-up university may find it hard to develop credibility for its degrees, but David Willetts, the Minister for universities, has floated the idea that they could teach towards the degree exams of established universities. This has worked in the past, and would give instant credibility to the degrees.

This opens up a range of possibilities. It seems unlikely that any single new institution would attempt to offer degrees across the whole range of disciplines. Instead we might see institutions offering, say, just a BSc in Computer Science, or just a BA in Spanish. This is reminiscent of the Independent Treatment Centres that transformed outcomes in health care; centres just doing cataracts or just hips. Obviously this does not provide the breadth of three years spent in a traditional university – chatting to people outside your subject, quizzing the great researchers in your field – but it would allow students to choose between these options and put a price on those factors.

Would this affect traditional universities, and alter the incentive structure for lecturers there? After all, this is where the bulk of students will be taught for the immediate future. It might. A new source of demand for talented degree teachers would raise their outside option and might force the traditional universities to pay more. The outcome depends in part on the co-production of teaching and research. Are good teachers good researchers, and vice versa, or not? What evidence there is suggests no strong correlation either positive or negative. In which case, there will definitely be an overlap in demand between traditional universities and new providers.

Of course, traditional universities will respond and make clear that their products are different, are distinctive. But they are likely to be more expensive too, and this gives students choices. There is likely to be a lot of innovation in institutional form and contracts following this path. How this will all pan out is unclear – the market for higher education is a complex one.

But it also creates a new market for talented degree-level teachers, and this may spill over into the pay and status of good teachers in universities. This in turn will encourage a re-balancing of lecturers’ effort towards teaching at the margin, and may have a greater impact on the quality of teaching in universities than any increased resources that may flow into the sector.