Performance Measures,Ranking and Parental Choice: An Analysis of the English School League Tables

ABSTRACT

Parental choice among schools in England is informed by annually published school performance (league) tables. The 2006 league tables included a measure of contextual value added (CVA) for the first time. By explicitly accounting for the characteristics of a school's intake, the aim is that CVA should isolate the impact a school has on its pupils' progress and so provide a measure of school effectiveness. In this paper we use UK government administrative data to replicate CVA and other key performance measures 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 school rankings based on CVA are largely uninformative for parents: almost half of English secondary schools are indistinguishable from the national average level of CVA.     

"Birds of passage" or "career" women? Thoughts on the life cycle of the eighteenth-century European servant

Frequently eighteenth-century service is described as a life-cycle stage used to build up the financial wherewithal to set up house. As such it was central to the way youth or girlhood was traversed, and studies of adolescent years rightly emphasise the importance of service. However, this narrative, while largely accurate, is also problematic. What happened when service did not end with marriage, or when a woman remained single well into adulthood? In practice, servants were found among both the married and single, and among the young and the old. Concentrating on the eighteenth century, and incorporating material from Nordic Europe, this article teases out some of the nuances in the context and experience of service that partially disrupt the established narrative.     

Change blindness can cause mistaken eyewitness identification

The current study investigated the effects of change blindness and crime severity on eyewitness identification accuracy. This research, involving 717 subjects, examined change blindness during a simulated criminal act and its effects on subjects' accuracy for identifying the perpetrator in a photospread. Subjects who viewed videos designed to induce change blindness were more likely to falsely identify the innocent actor relative to those who viewed control videos. Crime severity did not influence detection of change; however, it did have an effect on eyewitness accuracy. Subjects who viewed a more severe crime ($500 theft) made fewer errors in perpetrator identification than those who viewed a less severe crime ($5 theft). This research has theoretical implications for our understanding of change blindness and practical implications for the real‐world problem of faulty eyewitness testimony.