There is an enduring issue on whether student- and school-level covariates should be included in value-added school effects models, in addition to prior achievement. Proponents argue that the addition of covariates allows fairer comparisons of schools, whereas opponents argue that it excuses poorly performing schools and obscures policy-relevant…

Homework has traditionally been considered positive for students' academic achievement, to the extent that it makes children more responsible while learning. Nevertheless, making students do a large amount of homework has been one of the most criticised practices in recent years. Parental associations have long held the view that Spanish…

In the UK, USA and elsewhere, school accountability systems increasingly compare schools using value-added measures of school performance derived from pupil scores in high-stakes standardised tests. Rather than naïvely comparing school average scores, which largely reflect school intake differences in prior attainment, these measures attempt to…

Schools in England and Wales since the late 1980s have been compared in terms of their performances in public examinations and standardised test scores in the form of "school league tables", with Wales ceasing to produce these after 2001. One of the factors related to performance in examinations is the choice of the examination board,…

Value-added measures of educational progress have been used by education researchers and policy-makers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, contributing to performance-related pay and position in school league tables. They are designed to control for all underlying differences between pupils and should therefore provide unbiased…

Much has been made of the academic success of children who have attended private secondary schools in Britain, but far less attention has been directed to whether there are similar benefits from attending a private primary school. Using data from three British birth cohorts--born in 1958, 1970 and 2000/1--this paper profiles the family background…

Since 1992, the UK Government has published so-called "school league tables" summarising the average General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) "attainment" and "progress" made by pupils in each state-funded secondary school in England. While the headline measure of school attainment has remained the percentage…

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…