I have been thinking about social inequalities and education for the past decade and feel like I’m walking a well-trodden path that has a hopeful ending. Perhaps by telling you where it leads it’ll help you get to a productive destination quicker. I’ve spent my whole research career thinking that our best hope for fixing …
We don’t need better sorting hats to improve social mobility
This is roughly the talk I gave at a Policy Exchange fringe at Conservative Party Conference in 2016 I don’t like the words social mobility because they are so slippery as to give carte blanche to politicians to do exactly as they please. We appear to have entered an era where social mobility policies involve …
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I’m data blogging elsewhere…
Nearly all my blog posts here have involved data or reviews of fairly quantitative research. Except for one of the most popular, which was just a polemic about keeping school buildings open for longer. (I guess people aren't so interested in cold, hard facts about education policy after all.)From now on, all my 'normal' data …
Economics of Education
Economists analyse the production of education in this world where resources such as the capital invested in buildings or technology and the labour of the teacher workforce are necessarily scarce. This scarcity of resources means that policymakers must decide: How much to spend on each stage of education (i.e. what to produce); How to provide …
Mandating 10 hour opening times for school buildings*
*NB. Yes, buildings. Not teachers. Not headteachers. Not pupils. Today I’m blogging without data, or even much evidence. We have had a few interesting commentaries from education bloggers on longer school days (here and here), but the twitter debate fell quickly into criticisms about impacts on family life, which need to be challenged. I believe …
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Five observations on the TouchPaper problems party
Last weekend, Laura McInerney and I hosted a rather experimental TouchPaper problems party. Her blog here tells you what happened on the day and a few party goers have started writing up their own thoughts on the day (here, here and here). Here are five observations from the perspective of a rather-out-of-touch-with-the-classroom academic: 1. I …
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Announcing: The 1st TouchPaper Problem Solving Party
An invitation from Laura McInerney to our TouchPaper Problem Solving Party...
Averages and tails: What sort of pupils benefit most from Teach First participants?
When Joe Kirby and I presented data on whether Teach First is working at ResearchED2013 earlier this month, the best audience question came from Arthur Baker who wanted to know whether the improvements in average school attainment following Teach First participation meant that the most disadvantaged students were benefiting, or not. This question struck a …
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Do we really have to wait a whole year for researched2014?
Others have blogged about researched2013 and how great it was. I want researched2014 to be just like researched2013 because it was perfect. But just in case Tom Bennett and Helene decide to tamper with the current model, here are seven (it's always 3 or 7) minor modifications I’d vote for: Many participants were tweeters, so …
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How can we learn if Teach First is working?
Last week I published a paper I wrote with Jay Allnutt about the impact of Teach First on GCSE attainment. We received a large amount of feedback on the paper, via a seminar presentation at BERA conference, comments on a blog I wrote, twitter and email. Rather than simply present these research findings at researched2013, I …
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Becky Allen 