Comparing HE and school outcomes
For someone to do a decent job* there are an awful lot of things to consider. It’s NOT going to be simple!
You can’t just take all the families known to a Local Authority and do a straight average of GCSE results to compare with average school outcomes. For a start families known to their LA are heavily slanted towards those whose children went to school and were deregistered for some reason, usually a serious problem. Families which have home educated from the start are much more likely to be ‘unknown’.
It would hardly be fair for example to compare a boy with severe SEN who was withdrawn from school age 13 after years of unresolved bullying with the national average for all children and try to claim a poor outcome for HE. You would have to compare him with a similar boy who remained in school, a like for like comparison to see what difference those few years of HE vs school made. Even for children HE from the start you’d need to compare them with the same socio-economic group in the same area to get a fair comparison.
The other big problem is, how do you measure outcomes? Not a trivial question as a combination of freedom from the requirement to do GCSEs and parents having to fund them means that HE children very often just don’t take them. You might compare UCCA scores at 16 or maybe 18? That at least would count in A Levels taken early, IGCSEs, music grade exams etc. That does perpetuate the idea that it’s all about exams of course but it would paint part of the picture. Maybe look at what they’re doing at 18, actually look rather than rely on NEET figures which, as we’ve seen, are a bit rubbish.
Then I suppose you probably ought to figure in the social outcomes, levels of crime, drug use, teen pregnancies, all the stuff that politicians get worked up about. Again taking care to adjust for time spent in school and what problems, if any, started there. For example you can hardly pin a teen pregnancy on HE if the girl in question only became HE after she got that way!
No, it really is NOT going to be simple.
* hands up everyone who thinks that the DCSF have no desire to fund anyone doing a decent job
Maire Said on February 12th, 2010 at 8:55 pm quote
Wish you could draw in these boxes, this represents my hand: up.
Dave H Said on February 12th, 2010 at 8:58 pm quote
Money for old rope? Ask DCSF what conclusions they’d like, invent a few fictional families, make some notes and write something about them that supports the conclusions. All families must be anonymous, of course, so they can’t be followed up with FOI requests, and using fictional characters saves having to go to the trouble of finding families who’ll sign up to the study.
Bubble Said on February 13th, 2010 at 11:55 am quote
Maire is right all familes must be anonymous so they cant be follwed up with FOI.
our hands are up the outcome is all ready decided!
6 hands here!