Funder: ESRC
Parental choice among schools in England is informed by annually published school performance (league) tables. In this project we use UK government administrative data to replicate CVA in order to investigate the extent to which the current league tables provide the information necessary to support parental choice on the basis of school effectiveness. We find that while CVA does provide a more accurate measure of school performance, school rankings based on CVA are largely meaningless: almost half of English secondary schools are indistinguishable from the national average.
