Close
The CEPEO Blog
By IOE Editor, on 2 February 2020
Welcome to the UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) blog. This blog is a forum for CEPEO members, affiliates, alumni and guests to write about research on our four research themes.
Our Research Themes
CEPEO concentrates on four research themes, each underpinned by the aim to improve the education system and equalise opportunities for all. These are:
We also recently published our evidence-based Policy Priorities, and have been blogging about each of these. You can see all of the posts about this topic here.
The implications of Labour’s plans for VAT on private school fees
By Blog Editor, on 17 July 2024
A lot of attention has been paid to Labour’s commitment to removing the VAT exemption currently applied to private school fees. The stated aim is to raise just over £1.5billion to recruit new teachers in the state education sector. However, concerns have been raised that this will price families out of private schooling and lead many to move their children to state schools. There are reasons to think, however, that such concerns are overblown.
Those who attend private schools are already highly concentrated right at the top of the income distribution, as shown in Figure 1. Only 5% of those with incomes that are above 80% of the population send their children to private schools, rising to 10% of those only once inside the top 10% of the income distribution, only then rapidly increasing above this point. So there just aren’t many of those outside the top of the income distribution attending private schools.
Figure 1. Probability of attending a private school across the household income distribution
Source: Henseke, Anders, Green & Henderson (2021).
And, perhaps because those attending private schools are almost exclusively from such affluent families, there is little evidence that even rather significant rises in fees cause parents to withdraw their children from these schools. Between 1980 and 2016 average fees trebled in real terms (i.e., relative to other prices). Figure 2 shows this in more detail — calculating average private school fees as a share of household earnings at different points of the income distribution as each of these have changed over time — demonstrating they have more than doubled in terms of the share of earnings across most parts of the distribution. Yet the share of English-domiciled pupils attending private schools has remained essentially flat throughout the period.
Figure 2. Affordability of private schools for households at the median, 80th percentile and 95th percentile of household income
Source: Green, Anders, Henderson & Henseke (2017).
This is because evidence shows that demand for private schooling doesn’t respond much to price (other factors also seem to be important among those who can afford it). Estimates of what’s known by economists as the price elasticity of demand for private schooling, such as those summarised by the IFS, imply an upper-end estimate from the imposition of VAT of a 7% fall in private school attendance. That implies less than a one percentage point drop in the share of the overall school population that is privately schooled.
And that’s assuming private schools just pass on the rise in fees in full without trying to cut costs. As with any organisation, if they are worried parents really will walk away, it seems more likely that they’ll try to minimise what they have to pass on — especially after so many years of being able to increase their prices above inflation. It is fair to say, however, that the private education sector is diverse and schools’ ability to do this will vary.
In any case, analysis by the Financial Times finds that across most local authorities there is sufficient capacity in the state sector to absorb all pupils currently attending private schools. That allows for a pretty dramatic scenario in terms of parents moving their children out of the private sector.
We should also set potential shifts from private to state sectors in a wider demographic context. Pupil numbers are falling (in primary at first, then secondary from 2028) by much more than the size of the private sector. This will also provide additional spaces over time if parents do decide not to send their children to private school. It seems considerably more likely that the challenges that our education system is going to face — in terms of the frictions for school finances and class sizes demographic shifts can cause — will be from declining, rather than rising, state school pupils in the coming years.
Frozen out – How English Higher Education has become a fragile sector
By Blog Editor, on 2 July 2024
By Richard Murphy and Gill Wyness
Of all the priorities the incoming government may have on 5th July, England’s higher education sector is likely to be low on the list. But this may be short sighted – our once world leading HE system has become increasingly fragile over the last decade, with both students and universities suffering from real financial hardship. This is in stark contrast to 2012 where the controversial tripling of tuition fees (to £9,000 per year) put universities in their strongest financial position in decades, and the income-contingent loan system meant students from any income background could attend university. So what has happened?
Myself and colleagues evaluated the series of reforms which took us from zero tuition fees to the highest average tuition fees in the world by 2012. (“The end of free college in England”). We evaluated these reforms in terms of: enrolments, equity of access and funding per student. We showed that enrolments had held up in the face of the significant fee increase, and the large participation gap that existed under free tuition marginally decreased, and the funding per head reached a 20 year high. The success of the system (by these measures at least) came down to i) the higher tuition fees injecting more cash into the system and allowing universities to expand, and ii) the well-designed income contingent loans system, which ensured that no student had to pay upfront fees, and had enough money to live on. The reformed system of 2012 protected against key market failures – credit constraints, risk and uncertainty and debt aversion – an economists’ dream.
So where did it all go wrong?
In short, with the governments’ decision not to index-link tuition fees and maintenance loans (along with the removal of maintenance grants). The tuition fee cap has only been allowed to increase once since 2012, by £250 . Tuition fees are now worth around 20% less than they were in 2012 (Ogden and Waltman, 2023). This is disastrous for universities, which rely on fees as a key component of their income. Things have been tough for students too – maintenance loans have increased over time, but have not kept up with the UK’s high rate of inflation over the last few years.
In the light of these issues, my co-author Richard Murphy and I decided to revisit today’s system, in terms of our three key measures of success – enrolments, equity of access and university funding.
Enrolments have continued to grow
For our first measure of success is easy to measure – have student numbers continued to grow since 2012? Here, there is good news. As figure 1 shows, enrolments have continued to increase at a steady pace since the 1990s, with a COVID-19 bump in 2020, due to more students receiving their required grades.
Figure 1: Student enrolments: number of full-time equivalent undergraduate students at UK HEIs
Notes: series break in 2000 due to change in sources. Source: 1994-2002, figures compiled by V. Carpentier. 2001-2021, Higher Education Information Database for Institutions (HEIDI)
Equity under threat as the value of maintenance loans decline
But have these increases in enrolment come from all sectors of society? Figure 2 shows the gap in participation between students from high and low SES backgrounds, Since 2005 there has been a slow general closing of the SES gap in enrolments between high and low SES students which has continued post 2012 (though it’s worth pointing out that the POLAR4 measure of SES used here has been criticised in the past – other measures are tricky to access but may show a different story). The exceptions are the 2011 and 2020/21 blips. The former likely caused by fewer SES taking gap years in order to enter under the lower fee scheme, and the latter the COVID-19 bump.
This general reduction in inequality is potentially surprising, given the deterioration in financial conditions experienced by lower income groups in recent years. Figure 3 shows the amount of money students from different income background have to live on while studying during each of the reforms. Since 2012, there has been little improvement in liquidity. An increase of about £1,000 per year in real terms for the poorest students, between 2012 and 2016 (as well as a gradual increase between 2016-2020), has now been eroded entirely by inflation, so that the maximum maintenance loan is now worth less, in real terms, than it did in 2016.
Figure 2: Higher education enrolment gap, POLAR 4 measure of deprivation
Source: UCAS End of cycle report, 2023
Figure 3: Net liquidity (grants+maintenance loans-upfront fees) by parental income for different fee regimes
Source: Authors’ calculations using data from Student Loans Company, 1991–2024. Figures expressed as amounts per year.
Funding per head hit hard as tuition fees frozen
Before 2012, a significant proportion of university funding came through the government teaching grant, with a smaller proportion from tuition fees. The 2012 reforms were designed in part to shift the burden of payment towards graduates. This was seen as preferable to relying on government to fund the system, which is invariably low-priority in times of austerity (Murphy et al, 2022).
Figure 4 plots university funding per full-time equivalent student, both for ‘domestic’ undergraduate students and all student types –postgraduate, undergraduate, UK, EU and overseas students (who typically pay higher fees). The funding per head for domestic undergraduates is closely tied with the tuition fee increases. Real funding per head spiked in 2012 then stabilised. But in recent years, funding per head has declined and now stands at the 2011 level.
By contrast, overall funding from all student types has not suffered the same decline. This reflects universities attempts to protect their balance sheets with income from students whose fees are unregulated – predominantly international students. Analysis from the IFS (Drayton et al, 2023) reports that in the 2021–22 financial year, tuition fees from non-UK students accounted for 42% of higher education course fees and 21% of all income for universities in England. Any reductions in the numbers of international students will translate into lower funding per head of domestic students.
Figure 4: Average funding per full-time equivalent student
Sources: Funding from all sources – statistics for 2000–2002 are taken from Carpentier (2004) and statistics for 2002–2021 taken from Higher Education Information Database for Institutions. These figures are not available for 2015,2016,2017. FTE enrolments used in the computation contain all student types (full-time, part-time, postgraduate, undergraduate, UK, EU, overseas); funding per head is for all students and comprises teaching grants and tuition fee income (the latter for all student types listed above). Funding from domestic students taken from IFS (2023)– total up-front public resources provided for teaching. This is effectively tuition fees for domestic students (minus any fee discounts) plus teaching grants. Figures expressed as funding per student per year. All figures expressed in constant 2023 pounds sterling.
An increasingly fragile sector
The governments decision to freeze domestic tuition fees – apart from the 2017 increase of £250 – as well as its failure to protect the real-term value of maintenance loans is perhaps not surprising. Tuition fees (and student loans) are perennially unpopular with voters (though less so when they are shown how much fee abolition would cost the taxpayer – as a recent Public First report showed) and no government wishes to risk the wrath of the middle-classes by putting them up during a cost of living crisis. But freezing university and students’ incomes is a policy decision as much as increasing them is, and it comes at a cost.
So far, the sector seems to have coped. Enrolments have held up, access to HE has continued to gradually improve , and university funding per head is still above 2012 levels. However, this masks an increasingly worrying picture. Funding for domestic students is in serious decline, meaning that universities are more and more reliant on international students to keep themselves afloat. Whether this is likely to be sustainable for much longer is debatable, as the impact of student visa restrictions is felt. Meanwhile, students themselves are increasingly squeezed by falls in their income from maintenance loans.
So what can be done? The obvious solution would be to immediately reverse the erosion of tuition fees and maintenance loans in real terms (and to index link fees and finance going forward). This would amount to an increase of around £2000 per year in tuition fees for home students (Ogden and Waltmann, 2023) – likely to be extremely politically unpalatable for a new government and its already cash-strapped electorate. The major party manifestos have offered little detail on how they might tackle the crisis. The Conservatives plan to keep the 2022 finance regime in place, the Liberal Democrats propose to hold a review and Labour acknowledge the issues stating ‘The current higher education funding settlement does not work for the taxpayer, universities, staff, or students,’ suggesting a review is on the cards.
But action is urgently needed to prevent universities – especially those with less access to lucrative foreign students – from going under. Given the strength of our university sector, let’s hope the new government acts before it’s too late.
Sizing up Labour’s ambition to address the teacher shortage in England
By Blog editor, on 28 June 2024
by Dr Sam Sims
The Labour party have promised to “recruit over 6,500 new teachers” in England.[1] The 6,500 number was apparently chosen to reflect the best available estimate of the shortage in England at the point when the policy was first announced in 2023. This blog post looks at whether Labour are likely to achieve the target based on their recent manifesto commitments.
In Labour’s 2023 education ‘mission’ document, they promised two policies aimed at retaining more teachers.[2] First, introduce a new £2,400 early-career framework (ECF) retention payment paid to all teachers after they complete their first two years on the job.[3] Second, reform retention incentives targeted at specific subjects and phases. In their manifesto, Labour announced that they have set aside £450m per year to spend on hitting their teacher target. This is to be paid for from the application of VAT and business rates to private schools.
There are a couple of different ways that we might interpret the 6,500 target. A less ambitious version would be to recruit or retain 6,500 additional people. This version is defined in terms of the ‘flow’ of people into and out of teaching. Of course, recruiting or retaining an extra person in a given year doesn’t mean they will stick around indefinitely. A more ambitious version of this target is therefore to increase the total number (or ‘stock’) of teachers in the workforce by 6,500 (1.4%[4]) by the end of the parliament. Let’s evaluate the likelihood of achieving each of these versions of the target.
Achieving the less ambitious target
Approximately 25,000 teachers per year will finish their early career training during this parliament.[5] This means the ECF retention bonus policy would cost around £60m per year. The £2,400 payment amounts to about 7% of a third-year teachers’ salary.[6] Research suggests that this would decrease the number of teachers leaving in the year the ECF incentive is paid by about 14-21%.[7] Since approximately 2,000 per annum leave the workforce after their second year on the job, this amounts to about 300-400 additional teachers staying on after their ECF each year.[8]
However, the research on which this is based focuses on maths and science teachers. These are the subjects in which shortages are largest, in part because those with STEM qualifications can often get paid more outside of teaching.[9] Labour’s ECF bonus will be paid to everyone, regardless of whether they are in a shortage subject or their likely earnings outside of teaching. The actual number of additional teachers retained each year is therefore likely to be a bit lower than 300-400.
Spending £60m a year on the ECF bonus leaves £390m per year for retention incentives targeted on shortage subjects or geographic areas. Existing research has modelled the costs of a £2,000 retention payment paid after each of the first two years of teachers’ careers (£4,000 in total).[10] Such a policy prevents a teacher leaving (in the short run) at a cost of around £63,000 per teacher.[11] Spending the entire remaining £390m on such a policy would therefore buy about 6,190 additional teachers per year, in the short run.
Taken together, spending £60m a year on an ECF bonus and £390m on targeted bonuses would, therefore, retain approximately 6,500 additional teachers per year. Sustained across the parliament, this would mean that Labour would easily exceed the ‘less ambitious’ version of their target. This raises the prospect of meeting the more ambitious, and more important, version of the target: having 6,500 more teachers by the end of the parliament.
Achieving the more ambitious target
Since Labour seem to have set aside plenty of money, let’s think about a radical policy to pay certain teachers an additional £2,000 retention bonus for each of their first five years in the profession. This supercharges the policy because the additional teachers in the system compound over the five-year period.
To fix ideas, let’s apply this to a cohort of maths teachers. By extending the modelling exercise in Table 6 of Sims & Benhenda (2022), it’s possible to estimate that this would lead to 423 extra maths teachers working in England by the end of the next parliament. Applying this policy to all new cohorts of maths teachers across the next parliament would come at a total cost of £28m.
This £28m price tag is a fraction of the £2bn that Labour has set aside for spending on targeted recruitment incentives for new teachers over the course of the next parliament. Evidence suggests that increasing the value of the retention payments has a broadly linear relationship with retention, at least up to £7,500.[12] Doubling the retention payments should therefore at least double the number of additional maths teachers by the end of the parliament.[13] Doing that across seven shortage subjects, which is affordable within Labour’s budget, would therefore likely be enough to hit the more ambitious version of the target.
An ambitious reform
The back-of-the-envelope estimates presented here contain many assumptions about how retention incentives will be implemented and play out. There is of course also considerable uncertainty about what will happen in the wider economy, and therefore to graduate job choices, over the next five years. However, what should be clear from the above is that Labour is committing a very serious sum of money to addressing the teacher shortage. To further put this in perspective, consider that the Department for Education budgeted a total of £450m for all spending on the ‘Teaching Workforce’ (including spending on teacher retention payments) in 2023/24.[14] Labour are planning to spend that much again, purely on addressing teacher shortages. If sustained, this investment is likely to go a long way toward solving teacher shortages by the end of the parliament.
Notes
[1] “Labour will use money raised from ending private school tax breaks to: Recruit over 6500 new teachers to fill vacancies and skills gaps across the profession” Page 10 here: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Mission-breaking-down-barriers.pdf
[2][2] “Labour will restructure teacher retention payments into one payment scale incorporating different factors such as subject and geography, based on evidence showing incentive payments are an effective means of retaining teachers with knowledge and expertise. On top of this, Labour will introduce a new Early Career Framework retention payment upon completion of the updated Framework recognising the professional development staff have undertaken.” Page 11 here: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Mission-breaking-down-barriers.pdf
[3] https://schoolsweek.co.uk/labours-school-policy-blitz-what-we-know-so-far-and-what-we-dont/
[4] https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/how-many-teachers-are-there-uk-england-scotland-wales-northern-ireland#:~:text=In%20England%20data%20from%20the,216%2C000%20in%20secondary%20schools.
[5] https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/teacher-and-leader-development-ecf-and-npqs
[6] https://www.nasuwt.org.uk/advice/pay-pensions/pay-scales/pay-scales-england.html
[7] https://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/datalab-simulating-the-effect-of-early-career-salary-supplements-on-teacher-supply-in-england.pdf
[8] About 2000 teachers per year leave after their NQT+1 year i.e. after ECF https://department-for-education.shinyapps.io/turnover-and-retention-grids/
[9] http://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/increasingscienceteachers-web.pdf
[10] Sims, S., & Benhenda, A. (2022). The effect of financial incentives on the retention of shortage-subject teachers: evidence from England. CEPEO working paper. Table 6. https://www.gatsby.org.uk/uploads/education/reports/pdf/the-effect-of-financial-incentives-on-the-retention-of-shortage-subject-teachers-evidence-from-england.pdf
[11] It costs more than £4000 per teacher because most of the teachers that receive the bonus would not have left anyway.
[12] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/656761b65936bb000d3166ea/Evaluation_of_the_phased_maths_bursaries_pilot_-_final_report_November-2023.pdf
[13] Depending on how the compounding plays out, it should more than double it.
[14] https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/40066/documents/195550/default/
More detail needed on what’s next for education policy
By Blog Editor, on 25 June 2024
The manifestos are out and the general election is looming. We at CEPEO, as the name suggests, are particularly interested in education policy and equalising opportunities. So, what did the manifestos actually tell us about potential plans in these areas? We focus here on plans set out by the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.
While the details differed, there were some agreed areas of importance across the parties: the need to recruit, train and retain high quality teachers; to do more to support children with special educational needs; and to incentivise more adult learning. These issues would probably appear quite high up most lists of pressing issues likely to be facing the Department for Education over the next few years.
There was also an emphasis on support for disadvantaged students. The Conservatives highlighted £3bn of spending via the pupil premium – helpful, of course, but only so high because of the very large proportion of pupils eligible now – 25% as of January 2024. Some of this rise is driven by transitional arrangements for Universal Credit, but I’m sure we could all agree that it would be better for far fewer children to be experiencing low family income, even temporarily.
The Liberal Democrats promised to go further on this front by tripling the early years premium to bring it closer to the amount allocated to school children – and extending the pupil premium it to those aged 16-18 as well – both very welcome ambitions. There were no specific details on this issue in the Labour manifesto, but one of their five missions is to break down barriers to opportunity, so there may be more specific announcements to come if they are the ones in office come 5th July.
There were also some clear omissions though. There was very little detail on what might be done to shore up HE funding. Labour and the Liberal Democrats were clear that ‘something’ should be done, but unclear what that would look like. Certainly no-one was brave enough to say that tuition fees might need to go up substantially. We can probably expect another independent review in the coming months to spell out the unappealing choices. The Lib Dems did commit to reintroducing maintenance grants, though, while the Conservatives re-emphasised their plan to close down “poor quality” degrees, which of course are challenging to identify and may disproportionately affect those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as we have discussed previously.
In contrast to the strong focus on the importance of high-quality staff for schools, there was also very little in the way of detail on a potential workforce strategy to help deliver the extended early education entitlements to children in working families from 9 months, which both the Conservatives and Labour have committed to delivering. The Conservatives are presumably relying on the market to deliver the places (and staff), incentivised by the higher funding rates they have committed to over the coming years. Labour are planning to re-use freed-up space in primary schools to deliver more places, but have not provided any specific details of their plans for the workforce.
While it is possible that providers will use some of the higher government funding to pay staff more, the market does not provide a strong incentive to invest in high quality staff – or in quality more generally. It is challenging for parents to identify setting quality (beyond Ofsted ratings) and many also weigh other considerations – such as availability and convenience – more highly when choosing a place for their child, suggesting that more will need to be done if we are serious about delivering high quality early education.
There is also a lot more that could be done to distribute this funding more equitably, as I spell out in this companion piece. And, of course, it would have been great to see consideration of some of our more ambitious policy priorities to equalise opportunities, including reforming school admissions, introducing a post-qualification admissions system and greater commitment to funding for further education (although credit to the Liberal Democrats for making an explicit commitment on this).
Of the three, the Liberal Democrat manifesto was the most ambitious in terms of the number and scope of specific policy ideas to equalise opportunities – but it certainly wasn’t radical. We must therefore hope that the next government is going to over-deliver on its manifesto commitments. For, as my colleagues so eloquently put it in a recent blog post, there can be no economic growth without education and skills. Ensuring that the benefits of this growth are distributed equitably starts with the education system. We here at CEPEO therefore hope that bolder action to equalise opportunities in education is just around the corner, whichever party is in power next month.
How prepared are we for the roll-out of the early education entitlements? No-one really knows …
By Blog Editor, on 24 April 2024
By Dr Claire Crawford
Today saw the release of a report from the National Audit Office – the public spending watchdog – assessing the Department for Education’s (DfE’s) preparedness for the rollout of the new early education entitlements. We’ve all read and heard the media reports about how unprepared local authorities and providers are for what’s coming. Warning bells have been sounded for some time. What do things look like from inside the Department? Are they as bad as they seem?
Some of the figures are certainly eye-watering: an additional 85,000 places required by September 2025, delivered by an additional 40,000 staff. But the uncertainty over these estimates is at least as large: while DfE’s central estimate for the number of additional staff required by September 2025 is 40,000, this could be as high as 64,000 or as low as 17,000 according to the Department’s estimates.
The report certainly doesn’t make easy reading for those charged with implementing this policy. But one of the main takeaways for me is just how much effort has gone into figuring out how many more places and staff will be required to deliver on this huge promise – which is not an easy task. We have virtually no evidence internationally, let alone in the UK, that tells us how responsive parents of 0-2 year olds are to childcare subsidies. Very few other countries in the world have done anything like what we are attempting in England at the moment. We just don’t know whether there are reservoirs of parents – let’s face it, mostly mothers – with very small children just itching to get back into the workforce or to increase their hours. Or whether, actually, when push comes to shove, they would prefer to stop working, or to work part-time, while their children are young. We are about to test that hypothesis on a grand scale.
But unlike researchers who can just sit back and wait to evaluate what happens post hoc, policymakers have to try to estimate parental demand, to understand just how hard they (and local authorities) need to work to ensure there are enough places (and enough staff to deliver those places). The Department is doing its best to answer this exam question. (Although it is disappointing to hear that a planned pilot was ruled out for affordability reasons – what a missed opportunity!) Their estimate of the number of entitlement ‘codes’ requested by parents – which they need in order to claim the funded hours for their child – in advance of the initial rollout of 15 hours of care for 2-year-olds, which began earlier this month, is, frankly, scarily accurate (246,833 against a prediction of 246,000). It’s not clear from the NAO report when that prediction was made, and of course this is at the easier end of the prediction scale: this first phase of the rollout was always going to largely be about subsidising families who were already using formal childcare, which we have data about. Some of the children who will be eligible for the rollout in September 2025 haven’t even been born yet.
One other nugget that leapt out at me from the report is that for a policy whose primary motivation is to improve the labour supply of parents, actually the Department expects the majority of benefits (around two thirds) to arise not from the short-term benefits of higher parental labour supply, but from the much longer-term potential benefits to the children themselves, who may be accessing more formal early education than they otherwise would have done as a result of the policy.
It would be wonderful to get under the hood of these estimates and see how much of this is predicated on them accessing high quality provision – whose importance is somewhat lost because of the focus on labour supply. But, in any case, because the policy is targeted on children in working families, these benefits will not be accruing to the most disadvantaged children in society. The Department clearly recognises the risk that this will increase inequalities – indeed, the report reveals that they explored extending entitlements for disadvantaged children alongside the extension for working families during pre-budget discussions with HM Treasury. That clearly didn’t end up being part of the government’s chosen approach. But the absence of such a countervailing policy puts the onus even more firmly back on the Department to take other policy action over the coming years to prevent the gap between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers from widening even further.
How do we fund widening participation outreach that works?
By Blog editor, on 8 April 2024
By Dr Paul Martin
Last week the Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, issued DfE’s annual guidance to the Office for Students (OfS) on strategic priorities grant funding, which includes centralised investments to widen access to higher education. Amongst this year’s announcements was a reduction in funding for the ‘Uni Connect’ programme – which is designed to support students from more disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education – by £10 million per annum.
This most recent reduction is the latest in a series of cuts which has reduced Uni Connect’s budget from £60 million in 2020 to just £20 million today, and represents the continuation of more than 20 years of dithering by governments of various political parties concerning the extent to which they should fund centralised widening participation (WP) outreach programmes. From the AimHigher initiative (which launched in 2004) through to Uni Connect today, governments never seem to have been able to agree on how much money to invest in these programmes or how long to fund them for. As observed in the recent Public First evaluation of Uni Connect, the constant uncertainly surrounding the programme has led to serious challenges when it comes to planning activity and retaining staff.
The lion’s share of outreach spending
These centralised programmes represent only a minority of the money spent on widening participation, though, with the majority spent by individual universities themselves.
From 2012 onwards, there was a considerable increase in the number of WP outreach activities delivered by universities themselves, with universities only able to charge the new maximum tuition fees of £9,000 per year if a proportion of fees above £6,000 were allocated to widening participation activities. Today, the situation is very similar – universities may only charge fees above £6,165 (up to a maximum of £9,250) if they have an ‘Access and Participation Plan’ in place which spells out how they will use their additional fee income to improve equality of opportunity. Figures reported by the OfS show that in 2022-23 England’s 198 HE providers pulled in more than £3.4 billion from fees above the basic level of £6,165 and that 25% of this higher fee income (or £859 million) was spent on ‘access and participation investment’ (including financial support for students). For initiatives that support ‘access’ in particular, an estimated £185 million was spent across the providers.
Good news and bad news
While not great news, therefore, a reduction of £10 million in the Uni Connect budget represents a relatively small reduction in our overall annual spend on WP access initiatives. Of greater concern is that we don’t really know whether we’re getting the most bang for our buck in terms of the way we use this relatively large pot of money to improve equality of opportunity.
For many years we have presided over something of a “good news and bad news” situation concerning access to HE for disadvantaged young people. As pointed out in a new CEPEO briefing note on this issue, the latest DfE widening participation statistics show that the proportion of free school meals (FSM) eligible school pupils progressing to HE continues to increase year after year. This is the good news.
The bad news is that overall, there does not appear to have been any narrowing of the gap in terms of FSM versus non-FSM eligible participation rates in HE. In fact, the percentage point gap in participation most recently reported by the DfE is the widest on record since they first began collecting the data 16 years ago. This is true whether we look at access to HE in general, or access to more selective ‘high-tariff’ universities. The percentage point gap in participation by FSM status might not be the only barometer we are interested in, but the lack of progress on this metric (and only minimal progress on reducing gaps in participation between those from different neighbourhoods) sits somewhat awkwardly alongside over £200 million of annual expenditure on this issue.
The importance of evaluation
We should not necessarily infer from these statistics that WP outreach has been unsuccessful. Whilst the proliferation of WP outreach has not coincided with a narrowing of the FSM participation gap, we should bear in mind the possibility that the FSM gap might be even wider still today were it not for the influence of WP outreach. But the fact that we can’t answer this question adequately is a problem: we still don’t know anywhere near enough about whether this significant investment in outreach has been well spent, or whether it could have been more successfully deployed in other ways. How can we change this?
First, we need to significantly improve our efforts to evaluate WP outreach initiatives effectively. Often, we don’t really know what works, because of the lack of experimental or quasi-experimental design in the implementation of WP programmes. We won’t be able to make significant improvements to the evidence base until this happens.
Second, we need to ensure that WP outreach programmes are targeted effectively and are recruiting the right people to take part. Recent research has evaluated the ‘Realising Opportunities’ outreach programme, which focuses on supporting disadvantaged young people to progress to more selective research-intensive universities. Programme participants were found to be much more likely to progress to these research-intensive universities when compared to predictions made by statistical modelling which took into consideration participants’ prior attainment and personal characteristics. Part of the success of the programme hinged on the fact that most participants would be unlikely to progress to research-intensive interventions in the absence of the intervention, leaving a big margin for improvement.
In contrast, some other programmes may not be so well targeted. For example, recent evaluations by TASO of online and in-person ‘summer school’ outreach activities found that the programmes were unlikely to change participant behaviour given that most participants were already on a pathway to HE even prior to taking part in the interventions. If outreach is to be successful, it has to avoid merely preaching to the converted.
Finally, we can improve the evaluation of WP outreach by making greater use of the rich education administrative data that we are lucky to have access to in England. The Realising Opportunities research used linked National Pupil Database (NPD) and the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) undergraduate record data, which remain underexploited in research in this area. The recent evaluation of Uni Connect mentioned above made use of the ‘HEAT’ (Higher Education Access Tracker) dataset which is a huge administrative record concerning participants in a large number of WP outreach programmes over many years. However, as this dataset was only available on its own, a comparison could only be made between those who had engaged more and less intensively with outreach programmes, with no comparison made with those who had not taken part in outreach at all.
If we can successfully link together datasets such as HEAT with the NPD and HESA records, we will have a more accurate view of the extent to which outreach participation makes a difference when all other observable characteristics of students are equal. If and when we are able to throw LEO earnings data into the mix too, we ought to be able to gauge the extent to which WP outreach programmes fulfil their ultimate purpose of supporting disadvantaged young people through the education system and into well paid careers. At this point we would have the clearest insight yet into which particular programmes offer the best return on investment.
Catch-22: we cannot have growth without a focus on education
By Blog editor, on 8 March 2024
By Professor Lindsey Macmillan and Professor Gill Wyness
We were having a discussion in our CEPEO team meeting yesterday about Spring Budget 2024 and the implications for education policy. As we outlined in our Twitter thread, there’s resounding disappointment across the education sector based on the announcements, with very little offered in terms of investment in education and skills. It’s no real surprise of course, given there is no money. Without any real prospect of economic growth this will be the story for the foreseeable future. And yet, and this is the catch-22 of it all, we cannot have growth without a focus on education and skills. In the words of John Maynard Keynes “We do nothing because we have not the money. But it is precisely because we do not do anything that we have not the money”.
Lip service is often paid to the importance of education and skills for growth, and we hear regularly about investments to support the development of skills in particular sectors – AI or green growth, for example. But while these skills are undoubtedly going to be important for future growth, it is the skills of the many, not the few, that are critical for productivity. And, as we know from a wealth of evidence about the effects of the pandemic, the challenge here is a daunting one. We can see from the most recent assessments at the end of primary school that the proportion of pupils reaching expected standards in reading, writing, and maths are down to 60%, levels not seen since 2016. In addition, inequalities have risen. The disadvantage gap is now higher than any point in the past decade.
As outlined in the Times Education Supplement piece this morning, there was a fully-costed education strategy put in place by Sir Kevan Collins, at the request of the government, in 2021 to help children who had missed school during the pandemic. This was based on the idea of three Ts. Teachers, Tutoring, and Time. Invest in the education workforce, invest in tutoring, and invest in extending the school day. Each one supported by rigorous evidence. And each one intertwined with the other to create complementarities to support education recovery. £15 billion was the ask, equivalent to £1,680 per pupil. This might sound like a lot of money but it was against a backdrop of estimates of the economic cost of learning loss reaching as high as £1.5 trillion, because of a lower-skilled workforce. In the end, only one tenth of this £15bn was offered up by the then Chancellor (and current PM), prompting Sir Kevan Collins’ resignation.
This is one example of the short-termism of government policy relating to growth: the reluctance to spend money now for the sake of future benefit. Those incomprehensibly large numbers of the economic costs of learning loss won’t fully hit now, but will instead permeate for decades to come. This means there is little incentive to spend the required money now; government won’t see the immediate benefits and get direct political gain in this election cycle.
Human Capital or Signalling?
A telling part of Sir Kevan Collins’ interview is that there was some kind of idea that the learning lost during the pandemic “would all just come out in the wash”. That children and young people who missed months of school would just catch up with little intervention required.
But this suggests that children can miraculously learn more in a year than they might otherwise have done with no further investment. That somehow teachers could be more productive after the pandemic than before – despite the myriad other challenges the pandemic created or worsened, not least significantly higher school absences. It also suggests that the government didn’t think that investment in the education system would have led to more learning.
But that goes against one of the fundamental theories of economics – human capital theory. The idea is that education increases the stock of human capital – skills – and higher skills fuel productivity and the economy, so investing in education is one of the most effective ways to drive sustainable economic growth. This is backed up by a wealth of evidence establishing a positive return to individuals and the wider economy from investing in education. Furthermore, education has been shown to have wider social benefits as more educated societies have higher levels of civic participation, better birth outcomes and reduced crime. We outline this in more detail in our briefing note “Does education raise people’s productivity or does it just signal their existing ability?”
There was also a lot of discussion at the time that learning loss didn’t matter anyway – because education is just there to act as a signal to employers about the relative abilities of different individuals, rather than something that directly improves their productivity. In other words, if someone has 3 A*s at A level, this tells an employer that they are a better worker than someone with 3 Bs, and it doesn’t matter how much knowledge or skills the person with 3 A*s actually has. But the evidence around this is much weaker as our briefing note describes.
Wasted talent
Linked to this is the belief that learning loss would be equally felt by all pupils. But again, the evidence (including from our own COSMO study) has shown the opposite. Learning loss is felt much more by pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, and thus failing to invest in catch-up has compounded inequality. This inevitably results in wasted talent, further stifling economic growth, as outlined in our UKRI-funded project exploring the links between diversity, education and productivity. Evidence from the US shows that between 20-40% of economic growth over the last 50 years resulted from a better allocation of talent.
Failing to invest when pupils are young also has knock on effects. Education and skills are like building blocks. It is much easier to build an individuals’ skills if they have an existing foundation of basic skills to build upon. This in turn leads to higher returns on investment, as individuals become more and more skilled.
The catch-22 illusion?
This isn’t the first time education has been side-lined in recent budgets. Even the childcare announcement of 2023 was really about increasing labour force participation, rather than investing in early childhood education.
This short-term outlook is the government catch-22: we need growth to invest, but we can’t invest without growth. We need to break this cycle and understand that human capital is the fundamental underpinning of economic growth.
Exploring gaps in teacher judgements across different groups and the implications for HE admissions
By Blog Editor, on 31 January 2024
By Oliver Cassagneau-Francis
This blog was originally published on ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK)’s website [link to original post].
In this blog post, CEPEO research fellow Oliver Cassagneau-Francis describes how he and the project team (CEPEO director Lindsey Macmillan, deputy director Gill Wyness and affiliate Richard Murphy) will use the Grading and Admissions Data for England dataset to study differences in predicted grades and compare the resulting outcomes for different groups of students. This project is funded through an ADR UK Fellowship.
Students from more advantaged backgrounds are three times more likely to go to university than their peers from less advantaged backgrounds, and they are also more likely to go to highly selective courses. These courses often lead to better careers. Recent work has shown that for students with the same level of academic attainment, the quality of the course they enrol into varies across socio-economic groups. In particular, students from more advantaged backgrounds enrol into more selective university courses than students from less advantaged backgrounds who achieve the same grades at school. This is true across the spectrum of student attainment.
A likely driver of these differences is the important role of teacher-predicted grades in UK university admissions. Students generally apply to university and accept their places before sitting their exams, relying on predictions of their grades made by their teachers (henceforth “predicted grades” or “predictions”). These are generally inaccurate.
Predicted grades became more complex during the pandemic
Unpacking UCAS predicted grades is a difficult task. Teachers are asked to be optimistic in their predictions, and so it is unclear whether achieved grades are the correct comparison for predicted grades. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, exams were cancelled and teachers, having already given the predicted grades needed for university applications, were asked to now give their students grades that would become their actual A-level results. These were called centre-assessment grades. Note that with these grades, teachers were asked to provide a realistic judgement of the grade each student would have been most likely to get if they had taken their exam(s) in a a given subject and completed any non-exam assessment; so there is not the element of optimism that is in UCAS predictions.
Therefore, we have two groups of students with different information on each: a group who have predicted grades and actual grades (the pre 2020 cohort); and a group for whom we have predicted grades and centre-assessment grades (the 2020 cohort). By comparing UCAS predictions with centre-assessment grades and with actual grades we can learn about how teachers make predictions.
In addition, in 2020 teachers were asked to rank students within the centre-assessment grades, meaning it’s possible to see which students just achieved a given grade and which ones just missed out.
How administrative data can provide new insights
For this project, we will use this unique information to study how teacher predictions differ across different social groups (e.g. by socio-economic status, gender, or ethnicity). We will also study the impact of receiving different predictions – teacher-predicted grades for university applications, and centre assessed grades – on outcomes, such as which university and course students went on to enrol in.
To do this, we will use the Grading and Admissions Data for England (GRADE) dataset. This contains de-identified data on students from:
- the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual)
- the Department for Education (DfE)
- the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS).
The data from these different sources has been linked together, de-identified and made available to accredited researchers. The dataset is very comprehensive, covering nearly all students who were in school in England and took their GCSEs or A-levels in 2018, 2019 and the 2020 cohort whose exams were cancelled in summer 2020. This project will focus on the A-level students from these cohorts.
Measuring differences in teacher judgements across groups
In this project, we will study carefully those students placed either just above or just below a grade boundary in 2020, using centre-assessment grades and teacher rankings. If these look different – for example, if women (or students from ethnic minority or lower socioeconomic backgrounds) are more often found at the top rank of a B boundary, than at the bottom of an A boundary then this suggests bias against women (or students from ethnic minority or lower socioeconomic backgrounds) – this will suggest that teachers might be predicting more or less generous grades for students from different groups. We will expand this analysis to look at specific subjects (e.g. Maths and English) and specific grade boundaries (e.g. A* / A). We can also perform a similar exercise using exam grades and marks (pre-2020), allowing us to compare the distributions of students around grade boundaries that are determined by exam versus those due to teacher judgements. Ofqual carried out their own analysis of the centre-assessment grades, finding limited evidence that student characteristics influenced grades, and they release equalities analyses for each round of exams.
In the second part of the project, we will again look closely at students just on either side of a grade boundary and compare their university enrolments and other outcomes. These students are ranked very closely by their teachers but look quite different to universities, as they received different (centre-assessment grades. It will also be interesting to compare outcomes of students who were ranked very closely by teachers, who were given different predictions pre-Covid. By comparing their outcomes, we will be able to isolate the impact of receiving an A over a B (both at the predicted grade and at the actual grade level), for example, on students’ university pathways.
Teachers are one of the main drivers of student success at GCSEs and A levels, success which then goes on to determine future outcomes. Understanding whether there are discrepancies in teachers’ judgements in favour of certain groups over others, resulting in differences in school attainment and university choices, will help us to understand the implications for social mobility and equity.
Universities bank on foreign currency
By Blog editor, on 29 January 2024
by Professor Gill Wyness and Professor Lindsey Macmillan
This weekend, we woke up to the news that reporters from the Sunday Times had discovered that some of the UK’s top universities are allowing international students into degree programmes with lower grades than UK students.
While at first glance, this sounds grossly unfair and very much against CEPEO’s mantra of equalising opportunities, others have pointed out that this isn’t ‘news’: these are ‘foundation year’ programmes that are designed to help students with lower grades get access degrees by taking a year-long course to prepare them for entry.
While the details around this are still a little murky (why does the international agent in the Sunday Times video promise guaranteed entry to second year? And why do these programmes appear to have 100% conversion rates onto degree programmes?), it has brought the perilous state of UK university finances to the forefront.
At the heart of this issue is the UK universities’ reliance on tuition fees from international students to balance the books.
The majority of universities’ teaching resources come from tuition fees, though they also receive some teaching grant from the government. However, the tuition fee cap has been frozen (apart from a small increase of £250) since 2012. This means that in real terms, it has been cut by around a fifth over the last ten years. Recent IFS analysis showed that per-student resources for teaching home students have declined by 16% since 2012.
Against this backdrop, international students are very attractive to universities. Their fees are unregulated, and universities typically set them at much higher levels than those for domestic students, meaning they provide huge amounts of much-needed income, particularly in tough times.
Crowding out or crowding in?
While it has long been the case that universities have used money from international students to subsidise UK students, it is reasonable to be concerned that increasing reliance on international students may result in ‘crowding out’, where talented UK students are denied a place on a course because that place has gone to a more lucrative, foreign student. But there is little evidence of this.
Research by CEPEO affiliate Richard Murphy, alongside Steve Machin, studied this question for the UK system between 1994-2011, a time of rapid internationalisation of the UK HE sector. Their study found no evidence that UK undergraduates were crowded out by international students. They also found evidence that postgraduates (whose numbers – like undergraduates under today’s system – are unrestricted) were ‘crowded in’ by foreign students. In other words, their work showed that foreign students provide much needed subsidies to the UK sector, and that without them, even fewer places would be available to UK students.
The evidence from this year also shows little evidence of crowding out; an interrogation of UCAS data from 2023 reveals that of students (under age 21) applying to all UK universities, 354,450 were from England, 28,010 were from Scotland, 15,560 were from Wales, and 14,650 from Northern Ireland. This compares to 82,760 from non-EU countries, and a further 18,810 from the EU. Thus, students from abroad make up about one fifth of total numbers.
This proportion has remained constant since 2018 – while the share of non-EU students has risen from 11% to 16% over the period, the share of EU students has fallen from 8% to 4%. Thus, it seems that UK universities are simply replacing EU students (who, as a result of Brexit, have faced higher fees from 2021 and are no longer eligible for fee loans) with non-EU students.
Out of options?
While these numbers may provide some reassurance on the issue of UK students being frozen out of the sector, there is no doubt that more funding for domestic students is urgently needed – particularly given demand from UK students is likely to increase even further in the next few years due to increasing participation and the population surge currently working its way through the secondary education system.
Figure 1: Pupil numbers in education
Source: Figure 3.1b) from IFS Annual report on education spending
However, this is politically and economically very tricky. Raising the tuition fee cap would be deeply unpopular with the electorate, given the cost-of-living crisis. A recent report by Public First found that a sizeable portion of the population still support the idea of fee abolition, although this declines when the economics of paying for this are explained in more detail. But the vast majority of respondents were opposed to the idea of increasing tuition fees.
Figure 2: Polling on support for changes to tuition fees
Source: Public First report on Public Attitudes to tuition fees
The alternative – injecting cash into the sector through raising the government teaching grant – would be extremely expensive, so is also unlikely to fly at a time of significant fiscal constraints.
In short, there are very few options available to the government, meaning reliance on overseas students is set to continue for the foreseeable future.
Too Much, Too Little? Finding the ‘Goldilocks’ Level of Assessment to Advance Personalized Approaches to Education for Everyone
By Blog editor, on 24 October 2023
By Dr Dominic Kelly
This article was first published by UNESCO MGIEP as part of The Blue Dot 17: Reimagining Assessments.
I like to think my teachers would say I was a relatively good child, but I am not sure they would say I was the most consistent one. In school, concentration on my studies was too often distracted by Pokémon cards, Arsenal F.C., and elaborate daydreams. As inconsistent as I was, from my experience, I knew that some of my classmates could be even less consistent – how they behaved yesterday could be radically different to how they behaved today, regardless of how clever they could be at their best. Given the challenges that many children face at home, there were many reasons for these inconsistencies. Did they get a good night’s sleep, despite a noisy, overcrowded house (Hershner, 2020)? Did they even have breakfast that morning (Hoyland et al., 2009)? Therefore, if you had entered our classroom with a clipboard and a page of arithmetic on a random Wednesday afternoon, I am unsure that you would have caught all of us at our best – or even at our most typical. Likewise, whether our typical selves happened to be present on the same day as standardized tests were administered, was certainly not a given. Perhaps this all seems obvious to you but, despite this, why are single assessments of children often assumed to be representative or reliable?
In recent years, there have been understandable worries that we assess children too much (Hopkinson, 2022). Students and parents have reported that schools put too much focus on ‘high stakes’ testing, potentially to the detriment of children’s ‘love of learning’ (More Than a Score, 2020) and to their mental health (Newton, 2021) – although it should be noted that recent empirical research in a British sample found no relation between children’s wellbeing or happiness in school and participating in standardized testing (Jerrim, 2021). Either way, there is a distinct possibility that high- stakes standardized assessments are not the most representative way of assessing children’s educational capabilities (e.g., Morgan, 2016). Furthermore, I would also suggest that the most vulnerable children from the least consistent home settings are often those assessed the least fairly. Increasing evidence suggests that our cognitive performance in any given moment is affected by many contextual factors (e.g., Chaku et al., 2021). If so, given the variability that we know all children but especially the most disadvantaged show, conclusions about academic behaviours which are drawn from single measurements may not be as representative of a student’s capabilities as once thought because these measurements are affected by external factors such as sleep, stress or nutrition. Given this, there should be a real concern that single assessments, whether standardized or not, could be a format that works to the advantage of children from affluent backgrounds, while being particularly unfair to children from disadvantaged ones. For this reason, I would argue that education experts and developmental psychologists typically assess children too little. Instead of having occasional high-stakes assignments which potentially disrupt learning and increase tension in the classroom, I argue that there is a need for more frequent, low-stress assessments that occur in the background of the learning environment without disrupting instruction, which are not only more representative of achievement but also allow us to really engage with what makes a child’s classroom experience so variable from day to day.
Technological advances in educational technology (EdTech) offer us the potential to fundamentally change how interventions are developed for students, which can represent their variability in a manner which is much closer to “real time”, especially in high-income countries where many classrooms might have these technologies already available. Largely because of the substantial amount of labour and expenditure required to administer assessments, longitudinal educational studies have traditionally had long measurement intervals – for example, years or months apart. But what might appear to be relative stability in educational behaviours when assessed infrequently may in fact be a highly dynamic process with substantial fluctuations between days. Modern technology in the classroom setting provides the opportunity to dramatically reduce costs and both increase the number of assessments and decrease the intervals between assessments – for example, intervals of days, hours or even minutes. This latter approach to assessment can be considered prototypical of intensive longitudinal designs, which involve the collection of many repeated observations per person (also known as micro-longitudinal designs). Data for these studies are often collected by measuring individuals’ thoughts and behaviours, typically in familiar environments (e.g., the classroom, at home), instead of unfamiliar laboratory environments, with relatively non-intrusive smartphones, tablets, wearable technology, and so on. These assessments go beyond traditional continuous assessments as contextual, non-cognitive factors can be collected too. These studies may also be more accurate due to the decreased intervals between when thoughts and behaviours occurred and when they are reported (Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2014).
One of the most important benefits of collecting intensive longitudinal data is the potential to adapt instruction to the needs and variability of each child. Instead of generalising broad conclusions across students, we have the potential to utilize previously unfathomable amounts of data collected from EdTech to create highly personalized models for every child. To date, intensive longitudinal studies have disproportionately featured adults (e.g., Kelly & Beltz, 2021) and have rarely been set in the classroom. Yet, compared to data collected much less frequently, intensively collected data on the variability of student’s’ experience can be sought regularly in the classroom – learning behaviours and outcomes, wellbeing, peer interactions, and so on. Personalized education is a burgeoning field focused on leveraging ‘big data’ to develop complex but parsimonious models based on students’ needs and nuances, which can lead to effective interventions, but there is still relatively little known about what factors in children’s daily lives are important for their academic achievement and wellbeing. Intensive longitudinal studies can inform this and facilitate potentially powerful personalized interventions. This personalization is particularly important given the diversity we see in the classroom. Many intervention efforts for equalizing educational outcomes have been designed for the ‘average student’. Yet, no student is average: students’ learning processes are contextualized by the intersections and interactions of each element of their identity, background, and history, which may not be consistent in how they manifest in the classroom every day. Rather than apply broad educational practices across students, leveraging intensive longitudinal data offers enormous potential for developing highly personalized models and interventions tailored to each student’s unique needs.
Given that personalized approaches to education require a greater number of assessments than other approaches, there is some concern that administering regular assessments could be burdensome for teachers and potentially disrupt learning. The innovative applications of EdTech, so that assessment goes relatively unnoticed while providing the most benefit, are therefore essential. Many classrooms in high-income countries already have some relevant technological infrastructure in place, even if it isn’t intended for that purpose yet. Daily educational data is already being collected: namely, formative assessments which are used at the moment by educational professionals to monitor progress. Although continuous forms of assessment can potentially be useful for reducing the pressure on students on specific occasions, their potential is being underutilized: these data also allow for a more fine-grained understanding of what predicts and what is predicted by students’ daily variability. The thoughtful measurement and modelling of this data could be elucidating, but there is still a lack of suitable methods, leaving the field “data rich but information poor”. If this data could be complemented by other short-form, easy-to-administer surveys about behaviour or cognition, it would be possible to address questions about children’s individual progress and setbacks in the classroom, without placing extra stress on teachers. To ensure this, thoughtful teacher training will need to be developed and provided, which itself will likely need to be tailored to teachers’ existing knowledge of EdTech. An important challenge will be determining the right number of assessments that provide enough fine-grained detail to understand the complexity of a child, but that is not so demanding that it impedes the classroom – in fact, that ’Goldilocks’ number of assessments may itself be unique to each child. Of course, there are continued inequities in access to these opportunities as it is mostly high-income economies that have embedded technology in their classrooms, and there are also notable differences in opportunities within those economies. As EdTech decreases in cost and hopefully spreads to more diverse settings, an important challenge will be designing and administering assessments which are culturally specific to local educational needs and resources.
Another potential limitation of intensive longitudinal designs is that they track fluctuations over short periods of time, but do not alone allow for plotting long-term changes. Therefore, there is a clear need for studies and interventions that combine both traditional and intensive longitudinal assessments together – what are called ‘burst designs’ (Stawski et al., 2015). For example, one could measure children’s academic performance and experience in the classroom every day for two weeks, every year for five years. Such a design would have the potential to address unique questions about how short-term fluctuations become long-term change. Are there specific times in a child’s life where they are the least consistent in their behaviours, and does that matter? Is a child’s lack of consistency in daily assessments indicative of problem behaviours in later life? Only by integrating intensive longitudinal data and traditional longitudinal data can these questions be addressed.
In sum, we have good reason to question whether single assessments can truly represent the variability of a child’s experiences in the classroom. Contextual factors can lead to substantial fluctuations in cognitive performance. Intensive longitudinal studies to measure these fluctuations have previously been used primarily with adults, but this work has generally not yet translated to the classroom or with children, despite the potential that the thoughtful leverage of this type of assessment offers for our understanding of variability and the future of personalized education. Furthermore, there is a distinct need for research that suitably assesses both short-term fluctuations and long-term change together, to determine how the former becomes the latter in ways that are potentially unique to each child. I believe this to be a worthy endeavour – individualized approaches to education which fully engage with the heterogeneity of the unique disparities that students face, have the potential to reduce barriers, equalize outcomes, and improve social mobility. The inconsistency of a child’s cognition or behaviours should not be treated as error, noise or inconvenience but as a vital, and long overlooked, aspect of their development.
I’d like to thank my doctoral dissertation committee – Drs. Adriene Beltz, Pam Davis-Kean, Robin Edelstein, and Ioulia Kovelman – for their insight in developing this line of research with me.
