Many schools will be facing financial pressures over this Parliament. Overall funding for schools is expected to fall by at least 5.5 per cent per pupil, alongside a reduction in funding for school support (the Education Services Grant). The introduction of the welcome and long-awaited National Funding Formula in 2018, which is expected to distribute school funding more fairly, will see some schools receive large reductions and others large increases in funding. Several factors will also contribute to rising school costs, as Reform has previously outlined. This includes increases in employer pension and national insurance contributions and possibly subjection to the apprenticeship levy.
The pressure on overall school budgets makes improving value for money a vital task. Evidence suggests there is scope to do this, as there is no clear link between per-pupil spending and pupil progress at school. However, schools are not in the habit of it, as budgetary pressure is relatively new. There has been no real terms reduction to per-pupil funding since 1997, and from 2010-11 to 2014-15 spending rose by 0.6 per cent per pupil. To be able to continue, and improve, the modest levels of attainment progress seen over this period of growth, it is therefore crucial to identify instances of best practice from schools that currently deliver more for less.
In an experimental research project, Reform sought to identify which types of schools provide better value for money. In a series of blogs to be published over the next two weeks, we will share the methodology and findings of our research. This blog provides an overview of the framework and key objectives of the research.
Reform used the value for money framework outlined in its previous report, Towards a more productive state. Given the current focus on how schools are governed, and the structural changes accompanying increased academisation, an obvious question poses itself: are different school structures accompanied by different decision-making? More importantly, are these decisions linked to pupil outcomes? Reform therefore decided to compare schools' behaviour and outcomes according to school type, to see if some tended to be at the lower or higher end of the performance spectrum.
The indicators
To identify schools that provide value for money, Reform constructed and applied measures of economy, efficiency and effectiveness. In brief, economy measures how much money is spent, efficiency measures how well money is spent, and effectiveness measures whether objectives have been achieved.
Reform populated these measures with school-level data. For economy, this translated into four indicators: spending on all teachers per teacher and, per pupil, spending on education support staff, staff training and development, and energy. Efficiency indicators were created using a ratio of the number of pupils per teacher, pupils per teaching assistant, and pupils per member of other support staff. And finally, effectiveness was measured in terms of the average point score (APS) of all pupils in the school – that is, performance in qualifications taken at the end of primary or secondary school.
The indicators were chosen because of their significance in various ways: more than half of school budgets are spent on staff; energy spending may indicate schools' ability to negotiate contracts; ratios between staff and students are continuously on the political agenda, and average point scores are a simple and accessible way of assessing pupil performance.
The comparison groups
It would not be fair to make comparisons across all schools in the country. Some have higher rates of disadvantaged pupils, of pupils with special educational needs (SEN), and so on. It is crucial, therefore, to compare like-for-like schools, as many of the value for money indicators chosen vary according to the context of the school.
Reform therefore decided to create 'clusters' of schools, where those most similar would be grouped together and compared only with one another. This would allow a fair comparison of economy, efficiency and effectiveness and enable provisional conclusions to be drawn about whether certain school types were better at managing with less.
In the next blog, Reform will explain the clustering mechanism and what kind of clusters were created. This technique was extremely experimental and had varying degrees of success. Indeed, one of the trade-offs with the method used was that clusters of schools were not as homogenous as we would have liked. As a result, the conclusions are highly tentative, but we nonetheless feel that sharing the methodology and findings will be valuable for others conducting research into this area. The following blogs will outline our findings, and those areas that need further research.
Further research
The success of this research lies on the robustness of the methods. However, to ensure that our schools can maintain and improve outcomes with increased funding pressures, this area of research must continue to evolve. Cases of best practice should be identified, as should the structures and curricula that best encourage such best practice. Hopefully, experimentation will continue, and tangible observations of how the best schools are run can be made.
Not only parents are concerned with the continuing improvement of the country's schools, the quality of state-provisioned compulsory education is deeply entwined with concerns ranging from national productivity levels to social mobility. The challenges schools are currently facing therefore cannot be allowed to compromise the quality of the education they provide.
Over the next two weeks, Reform will publish a series of blogs documenting its research on value for money in schools. The second blog, published later this week, will provide an overview of the methodology and techniques used to compare schools. The third and fourth will summarise the findings of the research.
