Considering primary school effectiveness: an analysis of 1992 Key Stage 1 results

The issue of value added measures of school effectiveness is reviewed in relation to the British government's requirements for schools to publish raw examination results. In the light of this there is an important need to investigate factors outside the control of the school (such as pupils’ achievement on entry to the school and socio‐economic status) that may have an impact on pupil attainment (at the primary level as well as secondary level) and, where appropriate, to take account of these factors in the analysis of schools’ assessment and examination results. The study reports a series of multilevel analyses of the 1992 National Curriculum assessment results for 7‐year‐olds in one large county local education authority (LEA) employing a wide variety of pupil intake factors (such as gender, first language and low family income) and school/classroom context variables (such as class size, number of class teachers, percentage disadvantage). The methodology involves evaluating an interim procedure for measuring primary school effectiveness (in the absence of prior attainment data) that controls for different pupil and school background factors. The findings indicate that a substantial percentage of school level variation in pupil outcomes can be explained by the pupil intake factors and that the rank ordering of some schools can change dramatically between the raw results and the value added measures. Within individual primary schools there is also evidence of a lack of consistency in effects according to curriculum area (e.g. English and mathematics). The implications and limitations of the findings are discussed in relation to (i) the usefulness of KS1 assessments in measuring primary school effectiveness, (ii) the need to widen the scope of school measures to reflect more fully the complex nature of school effectiveness, and (iii) how the methodology may be employed to stimulate approaches to school self‐evaluation and school improvement.