Understanding low achievement in English Schools

Tens of thousands of young people leave school with no or very few qualifications inEngland. This paper seeks to build a fuller picture of Key Stage 4 low achievementand its correlates than available hitherto. We focus on three aspects. Firstly, the role ofstudents’ personal characteristics, especially gender, ethnicity and past achievement,in explaining the incidence of low achievement at age 16. Secondly, we investigatethe extent to which particular personal characteristics constitute direct risk factors forlow achievement and the extent to which they lead to low achievement because oftheir correlation with unobserved school and neighborhood quality, i.e. the role ofsorting into schools and neighborhoods of different quality. We suggest a method ofcalculating school quality (how effective a school is in helping its pupils to avoid lowachievement) which is akin to the value-added concept, and examine which specificobserved school characteristics predict this measure of ‘school quality’. Thirdly, thepaper examines the relationship between school resources – particularly per pupilexpenditure – and the avoidance of low achievement, exploiting the panel nature ofthe National Pupil Database. Going beyond simple discrete choice models, the paperemploys school fixed effects regression to reduce endogeneity problems and employspanel data at the student level to analyse school resource effects. A number ofinteresting findings emerge about the correlates of low achievement and of schoolquality, and we consider the policy implications of our findings.[...]