The theory that schools can promote the progress of pupils so as to overcome the influence of family, community and individual attributes, underpins British studies of school effectiveness. Measures of value added have been developed as sophisticated ways of analysing potential school effects. Desmond Nuttall played a key role in adapting the statistical technique of multilevel modelling to the issue of value added. In this paper we provide a general introduction to three topics and describe three, as yet, unresolved issues: whether value added results are stable over time; whether schools have differential results for different pupil groups; and whether the contextual features of a school exert a powerful influence on its performance.
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Mortimore et al. (1994) studied this question.
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