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.     

Three difficult months in ‘Iraq

Though the build-up of China's blue-water fleet is causing consternation in foreign-policy circles, the country's on-going expansion into Russia and the former Soviet Union has scarcely garnered comment. For the past decade, China has used its foreign reserves to acquire strategic assets (principally infrastructure and natural resources) and tracts of sovereign territory along its existing borders and increasingly further afield. The impact on targeted countries (and, in turn, their own foreign policy) is extreme, with serious implications for security and economics far beyond their borders. This article provides an overview of China's acquisitions and investments in Eurasia, followed by more detailed discussion of recent developments and responses in Central Asia, Ukraine and Mongolia, and Siberia. It then looks at the impact of China's actions on Sino-Russian relations, discusses the importance of Russia and Central Asia as a resource corridor and buffer zone between Europe and China, and suggests how these manoeuvrings might result in long-term benefits for China.     

The Value of Non-Governmental Intelligence: Widening the Field

In the UK, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has a poor track record of predicting attack. In the US, official inquiries into 9/11 identified ‘a failure of imagination’ to conceive of a large scale threat to the American homeland. There is a long-standing literature on surprise attack which emphasizes that clues to predict attack often exist but are not pieced together by an intelligence sector which is not structured to look in the right direction. In a world of increasingly fragmented threats and weak signals, it is apparent that much of the challenge in intelligence work now lies not in collection but in managing requirements, setting priorities, and conducting incisive analysis based on the ability to imagine new threats. One solution to a failure of imagination is to widen the range of people who can contribute to the task. Non-Governmental analysis of security issues, whether by academia, civil society or the private sector, can help to identify emerging issues and set priorities. Whilst collection of secret intelligence may always remain the preserve of specialist Government agencies, the rest of the intelligence cycle can benefit from external contributions and open source intelligence. We argue that the process of setting intelligence requirements could be opened to a wider range of actors. In conflict environments, there may be particular value in an open process to identify what each side would need to know about the other to confidently seek peace.