Contextualization of school examination results 1992

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Abstract
Early in 1992, a group of nine secondary schools within one local education authority (LEA) decided to investigate ways of improving on the ‘league table’ approach to looking at GCSE results for their schools. As a result of LEA decisions taken several years earlier, almost all the 1,400 pupils due to take these examinations in summer 1992 had taken the same test at or near the stage when they entered secondary school. The availability of these test scores, combined with the willingness of the schools and the LEA to collate other pupil and school information, enabled the study described here to be set up. Multilevel modelling techniques were used to try to derive measures of relative effectiveness for these schools, taking into account some of the characteristics of their pupils. The results show not only that ‘league tables’ based solely on GCSE results are misleading, but also that the ranking of schools differs markedly depending on the measure of outcome being considered.

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