This report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that Progress 8 is a reliable measure of school effectiveness and that parents often do not apply to their most effective local school - and that this is especially true for parents living in poorer areas.
In England, parents are given freedom of choice over which secondary schools their children want to apply to, alongside various indicators of school quality. The indicators exist to help parents make informed choices, and the intention is that parents prioritising the most effective secondary schools in their area will serve to generate competition between schools, and ultimately drive-up standards.
This study considered whether parents prioritise high value-added (or ‘more effective’) schools when looking at schools. It evaluated how well value added models such as Progress 8 perform in practice and compares how well value added models predict outcomes of students.
It found that parents do not consistently apply to their most effective local school. There are large gaps in the value-added of parents’ first-choice schools and the school with the highest value-added score in the local area. This suggests that factors such as distance or peer composition are also important and influence their choices of where to apply.
This is especially true for parents from poorer backgrounds. On a value-added basis, the best school within relatively easy reach of poorer pupils performed similarly to the best school within relatively easy reach of richer pupils. But better-offpupils are much more likely to put a high value-added school as their first choice. The best-off pupils (in the top fifth by socio-economic status) on average stated a preference for a school two-thirds of the way up the value-added distribution. The least affluent (those in the bottom fifth by socio-economic status) tend to put schools that perform below the average on this measure as their first choice.