Value for money in schools
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Reform published a series of blogs exploring the issue of value for money in schools. Achieving value for money in schools should be a crucial target considering the financial pressure that many will feel over the course of this Parliament. We used an experimental clustering technique to gather the data and subsequent results.
Value for money: can schools do better?
The first blog provides an overview of the framework and key objectives of the research.
Many schools will face financial pressures over this Parliament due to range of factors including an overall reduction in schools funding. Improving value for money in schools will therefore be a vital task.
Read the full blog here.
Experimenting with algorithms for school comparisons
The second blog in the series outlines the technique Reform experimented with to compare similar schools.
The overarching idea was to create static groups of similar schools before examining differences in the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of school types within those groups – such as academies and community schools. This blog also presents results from Reform’s attempt to create homogeneous school clusters using a sample of both primary and secondary school-level data.
Read the full blog here.
Schools' teaching workforce
The third blog in the series focuses primarily on schools’ teaching workforce. It looks at how schools perform across three indicators, described in the first blog of this series as Economy 1, Economy 3 and Efficiency 1 – that is, spending per teacher, spending on training and development and pupil-teacher ratios.
Read the full blog here.
School support staff expenditure and deployment, energy and attainment
The fourth blog in the series outlines the remaining findings of our experimental research relating to school support staff, spending on energy and pupil outcomes.
Read the full blog here.