Musings on education policy
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 …
Continue reading Averages and tails: What sort of pupils benefit most from Teach First participants?
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 …
Continue reading How can we learn if Teach First is working?
Today, Jay Allnutt and I published a new piece of analysis (PDF) showing that schools taking on Teach First participants have achieved gains in their GCSE results as a result of the programme. Our analysis tracks the performance of these schools in the first three years after they join the programme and compares them to changes in progress at a set of schools that look identical, except for their Teach First participation in that year.
We make sure this comparison set of schools have the same pupil demographic profile, the same prior levels and trends in GCSE performance, are in the same region of England and are all schools who will choose to join Teach First at some point in the future (formally this is known as a matched difference-in-differences panel estimation). Overall, school-wide gains in GCSE results are in the order of an improvement of about…
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