School Accountability

Schools are entrusted with a huge amount of money - around £30bn a year in England - and developing the future skills of our children. Despite £30bn being quite a lot of money, the latter is far more valuable than the former. Schools should be held accountable for how they deal with those. In England, the accountability system involves publicly available comparative school performance tables, and inspections by OFSTED.

I have been exploring whether school accountability matters, what are the implications of different accountability regimes for attainment and inequality in attainment, and what is the best form for accountability.

Scientific Papers

These links are to the Discussion Paper versions of the papers; these are freely available to everyone. Many of the papers are also published in scientific journals but those are often restricted access.

• Human Capital and Education: The State of the Art in the Economics of Education (2015) (IZA DP)
• Key Stage 4 Accountability: Progress Measure and Intervention Trigger. Technical Annex: Techniques for producing an unbiased national pupil progress line (2013)
• How should we treat under-performing schools? A regression discontinuity analysis of school inspections in England (2012)
• A natural experiment in school accountability: the impact of school performance information on pupil progress and sorting (2010)
• Evaluating the Provision of School Performance Information for School Choice (2010)
• 'Who wins and who loses from school accountability? The distribution of educational gain in English secondary schools' (2005)

Policy writing

These links are to short (-ish) blog posts written to highlight interesting findings or to comment on education policy.

• Managing a diverse and decentralised school system
• Why do we have such high-stakes exams for students?
• Education Policy in the Election 4: Accountability, Intervention and School Turnaround
• The New School Accountability Regime in England: Fairness, Incentives and Aggregation
• Threshold measures in school accountability: asking the right question
• Who fails wins? The impact of failing an Ofsted Inspection
• Why the new school league tables are much better … but could be better still
• What are Free Schools for?
• Reforming school performance tables
• Are school league tables any use to parents?
• “Systemic failure” in Welsh Education
• Two observations on the National Audit Office’s Evaluation of Academies