By Jake Anders, Lindsey Macmillan, Gill Wyness

 

Today’s level 3 results show a continuing post-pandemic ‘bounce back’, with A level grades largely improved since 2019 (i.e., before the pandemic) and since 2023 (which was the first year of ‘normal’ grading standards since the pandemic). The group of young people receiving their level 3 qualifications today were about half-way through year 9 when schools closed in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and were in the first year of their GCSE studies (year 10) in January 2021 during the second round of all-school closures. While they took their GCSEs under normal exam conditions, their results were adjusted according to the ‘glide path’ in 2022, with results adjusted to reflect the generous teacher assessed grades of 2021 and centre assessed grades of 2020.

A level performance by school type and region

First, looking by centre type, focusing on academies, independent schools, grammar schools and FE colleges (which the majority of pupils attend when sitting their level 3 qualifications), Figure 1 shows that, with the exception of further education (FE) colleges, the proportion of pupils achieving an A or higher at A level has increased across the board since last year, and since 2019. However, independent school pupils continue to be far more likely to achieve an A grade or higher than their state school pupil counterparts, and the gap between independent schools and academies has widened by 0.9 points between 2023 and 2024. Now, almost 50% of independent school pupils achieve at least an A at A-level, versus just 26.5% of those in academies – there is much work to do.

Also of concern are the results for those in FE – comprising typically more disadvantaged pupils. Despite their results improving somewhat since last year, they remain below pre-pandemic levels, with only 14.8% of A level entrants achieving at least an A this year. This is consistent with the evidence that those from disadvantaged backgrounds faced more disruption to their education during the pandemic.

Figure 1: A level results by school type

In previous years we’ve seen large disparities in A level grades across the country. Figure 2 shows results by region over time, again depicting substantial bounce-backs since last year, although clearly some regions have recovered faster than others. Pupils in London and the South East continue to be the highest achievers, with around 31% of pupils achieving top A level grades, but London in particular appears to be pulling away, with the biggest improvement among the regions since 2019. Meanwhile pupils in the East Midlands, the South West, and the East of England have seen their results largely flatline. Last year’s lowest performing region along this metric, the North East, has seen a large kick up in proportions achieving an A or above this year, which moves the region above the East Midlands.

Figure 2: A level results by region

T level expansion

Beyond A levels, it is somewhat more difficult to compare the results of other types of Level 3 qualifications over time. Figure 3 depicts the story for T levels, the relatively new technical-level qualification, which are broadly equivalent to 3 A levels, but provide a more “vocational” route for students. Having been developed in conjunction with employers. T-levels were launched in 2020, and 2023 was the first year where these qualifications were based fully on formal assessments. However, as they are relatively new qualifications, there are changes in the composition of students taking T Levels, and the types of T levels students are taking, meaning comparisons over time must be treated with caution.

As Figure 3 shows, the proportion of students achieving a ‘merit’ or above in their T-level has fallen by 10 percentage points since last year, with 62% of T-level students now achieving this grade. There are also marked inequalities by gender, with females being far more likely to achieve a merit than males.

Figure 3: T level results by gender

 

Note that this may reflect the different subjects taken by males and females. As Figure 4 shows, T levels are extremely gendered, with many of the subjects on offer being studied either mostly by males (e.g., Building Services Engineering, Onsite Construction and Digital Production, Design and Development – where over 90% of students are male), or mostly by females (e.g., Health and Education and Early Years – where over 90% of students are female).  Indeed, Figure 4 highlights that there are currently many more options available currently for male-dominated subjects compared to A levels (Figure 5) which offer a more balanced mix of male- and female-dominated subjects.

 

Figure 4: % of males and females doing T levels, by subject

 

Figure 5: % males and females doing A levels, by subject

 

In all then, today’s results will be good news for many pupils, as results seem to have recovered since the pandemic related disruption. But they continue to paint a stark picture of educational inequality by school type, region, and gender. There is still a great deal of work to be done to reduce these inequalities in attainment and in qualifications offered.

 

Jake Anders

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.

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/

Claire Crawford

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 5^th 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.

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.

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.

 

By Gill Wyness, Lindsey Macmillan, and Jake Anders

Today marks the first ‘true’ A level and Vocational and Technical Qualifications (VTQs) exam results since the more innocent days of 2019. Although pupils sat exams in 2022, their results were adjusted by Ofqual’s “glide path” which aimed to move results gradually back to pre-pandemic exam grading following the grade inflation of 2020 and 2021. So, a comparison of todays’ results versus 2019 should provide information about the extent of learning loss experienced during the pandemic. And the results present a bleak picture for inequality in England.

Back to the future?

Overall, the proportion of pupils awarded a C or above at A level is more or less back to 2019 levels. This is perhaps grounds for optimism; these students have had a very different learning experience compared to their peers in 2019. They experienced a global pandemic, and severe disruption to their schooling in critical years – as Figure 1 shows. In addition, this cohort did not sit GCSE exams, so lack that crucial experience of performing under pressure that previous cohorts have had.

Figure 1: Timeline of the Class of 2023

However, there is much less cause for optimism when we look at inequalities in the results. At the moment, these are only available across school types, and regions.

Mind the gap

Looking first at inequalities by school type, the gap between academies and independent schools has widened since 2019. The proportion awarded a C or above is down slightly in academies (75.4% in 2023 versus 75.7% in 2019) whilst it is up in independent schools (89% versus 88%). This represents a 1.3 percentage point increase in the state-independent gap, which now stands at 13.6 percentage points. For the top grades (A and above), the independent-state gap has widened slightly more, to 1.4 percentage points.

We already know that students from these different school types had very different schooling and learning experiences during the pandemic. Figure 2, from CEPEO’s COSMO Study, highlights the disparity in learning provision experienced by students from different school types during the pandemic. The disparities in A level performance that we see today are yet more confirmation that these students did not experience the disruption of the pandemic equally.

Figure 2: Provision of live online lessons, by school characteristics, lockdown 1 and 3

There are also notable inequalities across region. In particular, (and as was the case last year), London and the South East continue to pull away from all other regions with the largest increase in the proportion achieving A/A* since 2019, and some of the smallest declines relative to last year’s cohort. Meanwhile, the North East and Yorkshire and Humber are the only regions with a lower proportion achieving A/A* compared to 2019.

Competitor advantage

As discussed, it is harder to make comparisons between today’s results and last years, because 2022 results were adjusted by Ofqual’s glide path. However, for pupils receiving their results today, the 2022 cohort are their closest competitors in terms of higher education (gap year students) and more crucially the labour market, so for them, the comparison really matters.

Overall, results are down from 2022; this isn’t surprising and is part of the glide-path strategy. However, inequalities here are concerning; for C or above, the academy-private gap is up 3.8 ppts compared to 2022.

Among the highest attainers (A/A*), the story is more nuanced. Compared to last year’s cohort the state-private gap has narrowed (1ppt). Remember private schools had far more grade inflation at the top of the distribution when exams were switched to Teacher Assessed Grades in 2021, as figure 3 clearly shows. That they have failed to maintain this stark advantage among top grades suggests some of the record grades awarded over the pandemic were likely down to teacher ‘optimism’. But as mentioned above, the gap among high attainers is up since 2019, therefore also reflecting the better quality of learning experienced by private school students during the lockdowns.

Figure 3: Teacher ‘optimism’ across school types

Subjective scrutiny

Comparing subjects that are more or less objective to assess can also tell us something about how meaningful the results of 2020 and 2021 might be. For example, if we compare results for maths – arguably an easier subject for teachers to grade in their assessments – with drama, we see just how problematic the teacher predicted/assessed grades of 2020 and 2021 were.

 

Figure 4: Grades by maths and drama

The forgotten 378,000

Of course today isn’t just about A levels – a sizeable proportion of the Class of 2023 – over 378,000 students – took Level 3 vocational and technical qualifications. There is far less data available on these qualifications to provide any real depth of analysis – an issue in itself.

Following a similar pattern to A levels, higher attainment grades for level 3 qualifications are: – up relative to 2019 (at distinction or above), and down relative to 2022 (at merit or above)

Many have pointed out the worrying dropout rates of those taking T levels (the new, technical-level qualification which were launched in 2020) – although it’s important to note that these currently make up only a tiny fraction of vocational and technical qualifications. Of those who did complete, 90% passed with girls outperforming boys at higher levels.

Inequalities persist

In summary then, today’s results present a mixed picture for young people in England. On the one hand, results are back to the pre-Covid heyday, but inequalities are wider, and this again emphasises the inequalities in experiences during the pandemic. These will likely persist well into the labour market – a feature that our COSMO study will track well into the future. Look out for more bleak news to come. This should be a timely reminder to those making education spending decisions in Whitehall for future cohorts.

Lisa Belabed with Jake Anders and Lindsey Macmillan

Each year, CEPEO holds an annual lecture showcasing vital research on education policy and equalising opportunities. For this year’s lecture (held at Central Hall Westminster on Thursday 20 July 2023) we were delighted that Professor Joshua Goodman from Boston University, who recently completed a year in Washington DC on the US President’s Council of Economic Advisors, joined us to talk about his ongoing research on post-pandemic schooling challenges in the United States — which have many parallels with the challenges we are facing in the UK.

Professor Lindsey Macmillan, CEPEO’s Director, began proceedings by recapping highlights from the centre’s past year, including the recently released evidence-based policy priorities, and new research from the COSMO study, as well as reminding us that CEPEO was established just six months before the pandemic started, with its huge implications for educational inequalities and, hence, the direction of our research, including a shift to carry out work to understand post-pandemic schooling challenges.

How it Started

Professor Goodman’s talk was divided into three parts. He started with his research at the beginning of the pandemic, as 50 million children across the US saw their schools close their doors, for what would turn out to be periods ranging from a few months to over a year. At this point, there was virtually no data on school disruption of this scale, and this lack of historical precedent made it difficult to predict learning losses.

However, those unprecedented learning losses were difficult both to grasp and fully anticipate, and there were disparities among parents’ ability to and proactivity in responding to them. Professor Goodman and colleagues used Google Trends to try to quantify the extent of these responses: by April 2020 searches for school- and parent-centred online learning resources doubled compared to pre-Covid levels. Partly because of these differential responses, learning losses were worse for students in high-poverty schools, whose families were less likely to have the resources to compensate for their losses outside of school. Josh pointed out his own ability as a professor and former mathematics public school teacher in helping his children stay on track as exemplifying those disparities.

Beyond learning loss, Professor Goodman highlighted that school enrolment has also been adversely affected by the pandemic, with public school enrolment dropping 3% in autumn 2020, the largest decrease since World War II. Part of this can be explained by an increase in homeschooling, likely driven by health fears, but many of those students effectively vanished.

Josh was also keen to avoid being entirely negative in his assessment of the situation. One silver lining of the pandemic relates to bullying. Turning again to Google Trends data, Goodman and colleagues found that searches about bullying and cyberbullying (perhaps especially surprising for the latter) were reduced as a result of school closures. Suicide rates among children also decreased as schools closed.

How it’s Going

Having described the immediate impacts of COVID-19 disruption, Professor Goodman turned to post-pandemic recovery efforts. Early in the pandemic, the US federal government sent $60 billion to K-12 schools: an unprecedented use of federal funds for school support, as schools in the US are mostly funded at the state- or local-level. This was followed in March 2021 by Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), another $120 billion to be spent by 2024. A minimum of just 20% of ESSER was allocated to be spent on programmes to reduce learning loss, and a lot has rather been spent on temporary hires and salary increases for teachers. The extent of this support dwarfs that which we have seen in England, but appears to have been less well targeted.

As our understanding of the effects of the pandemic on learning loss has become clearer, the picture has remained bleak. The US has seen a drop in 8^th grade math scores estimated to lower lifetime income by 1.6% or $1 trillion across all affected students. Chronic absenteeism rates have doubled in many states — more so in schools with high proportions of ethnic minority students — with an average of 6-7 missed days per school year. And enrolment has remained an issue: there was no rebound in enrolment in autumn 2021 to offset the 3% of students who had left public schools at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. While there were widespread concerns about teacher burnout early in the pandemic, there is a lack of direct evidence on this point, but the rate of quitting has jumped 17%.

What now?

Concluding his talk, Professor Goodman was keen to focus on the future and what we should be doing to mitigate the challenges he outlined. Asking “what now?” he set out what he sees as the biggest challenges facing education policymakers at this moment. First, the big federal spending in light of the still terrible learning results is leading to a narrative of wasted funds, which makes it challenging to obtain further funding. But, he pointed out, this ignores the counterfactual: the learning losses without this federal support could very easily have been even worse.

Second, districts (somewhat equivalent to English local authorities, albeit retaining more oversight over schools than many now have here) still do not understand the scope of intervention necessary to tackle the learning loss that has become embedded. On top of this, they are concerned that adding instructional time is not popular, are finding high-quality tutoring hard to scale, and that the teacher workforce is tired, sapping energy for taking the urgent action still needed.

Third, there is a perception that parents do not have the appetite to tackle the embedded learning loss their children are facing. This is largely because they often do not recognise that their child’s academic skills were affected by the disruption of the pandemic, as school grades (“on a curve”) can have tended to obscure learning losses from them.

In the face of these challenges, Professor Goodman stressed the importance of getting attendance back to pre-pandemic levels, as absenteeism makes all other interventions less effective. This mirrors one of CEPEO’s policy priorities of reducing pupil absenteeism. He also highlighted the need to help districts (or, in a UK context, school and academy chain leadership) understand the scope of intervention needed, as well as the importance of choosing solutions that scale. For instance, tutoring has proven difficult and labour-intensive, and Josh argues that other, more widely manageable, teaching solutions would be preferable, notably through technology that supports, rather than replaces, teachers’ work.

Wrapping up

The lecture ended with Professor Goodman reasserting the importance of data, which is foundational in his research on education and economics — the same being true for CEPEO. In the US, the local nature of schooling presents major data challenges. He also stressed the need for timely datasets: federal enrolment data is released with a one-year lag, which he argues is much too long: by the time the data are released, another school year has already begun so policymakers often feel that priorities have ‘moved on’. He also stressed a lack of data on important issues such as teacher workforce, and the difficulty of measuring ESSER funds’ spending and efficiency.

Having had the opportunity to speak with members of CEPEO on their own research, Professor Goodman referred to the datasets being used and developed within the centre. These include pioneering use of administrative data such as the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes (LEO) dataset, in partnership with the UK Government, along with the COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities (COSMO) study supported by UKRI Economic and Social Research Council and in partnership with the UK Department for Education. He called for more partnerships of this kind in building datasets that will allow research that drives forward education policy by helping to identify schooling challenges rapidly and responding to them just as rapidly.

By Dr Dominic P. Kelly

Earlier this year, CEPEO launched ‘New Opportunities’, a list of practical priorities for future governments based on the best existing evidence across the social sciences. One of our recommendations regarded calls to abolish high stakes educational assessment by traditional means (i.e., ‘high stakes’ external examinations). Although these calls are not novel, in the wake of disruption to traditional GCSE and A-Level examinations in the past few years, those calls have certainly grown recently. Critics of external examinations argue that they are merely a test of rote memory of impractical knowledge and neither measure the underlying skill they claim to nor improve a child’s educational experiences or later outcomes. There is additional suggestion that these exams lack predictive value for future educational achievement, particularly in higher education, and provide additional stress for students. Based on the existing empirical evidence, we disagree with these assertions. On this basis, our recommendation is to retain external examination as the primary means of assessment and contend that not doing so would harm equity between students in a way that outweighs other concerns around external assessment. Yet, we also advocate for evidence-based improvements to assessments to be made with the intention of holistically improving both the examination system and national curricula and we detail some potential changes below.

 

External examinations are more resilient to examiners’ bias

One primary concern about external examinations is that they are disadvantageous for students from minority groups compared to coursework or continuous assessment. Although continued effort is needed to modernise the curriculum and provide content and skills that are relevant to diverse backgrounds, the evidence that alternatives reduce disadvantage for minority groups is lacking. It is often suggested that internal assessments by teachers would be an optimal alternative. But evidence suggests that teachers are prone to either showing bias or being inaccurate in their assessments of students from minority groups. Research has shown that some teachers demonstrably show ethnic bias in their assessments such that nearly three times as many Black Caribbean pupils received predicted scores below their actual scores than White students. Additional research also suggests that students from higher socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to have more favourable internal assessments by teachers than those students from lower SES backgrounds. Although it is sometimes thought that students from low SES backgrounds do comparatively better in coursework than examinations, evidence from the UK suggests that this is not the case. In addition, concerns about examinations causing increasing in student anxiety are contested: although test anxiety is a notable phenomenon among students, it has been suggested that there is minimal effects of test anxiety on performance in GCSE examinations and that children’s wellbeing or happiness was not related to their participation in Key Stage 2 external examinations. Therefore, systems without anonymous external assessments are thought to have substantial biases and this would have deleterious effects for reducing inequalities in the UK education system.

 

External examinations can be complemented by improvements made elsewhere

Despite our recommendation that external assessments remain the primary means of assessment, that is not to say that these assessments could not be complemented by evidence-based approaches to reform to the current curricula and assessment. First, concerns over the practice of ‘teaching to the test’ could be addressed by changing the content of the external examinations to reward a richer approach to teaching, which would likely benefit students. For example, providing examples with “higher level” items in classroom assessments (which encourage deeper processing of information than items that only require rote learning) may yield comparatively stronger performance on both low- and high-level items in external examinations. Incidentally, reducing the amount of time teachers spend on providing their own assessments of students could potentially provide more time for other activities in the classroom. Second, portfolios and other types of summative assessments can have utility as a complement to traditional exams but they should be marked externally by someone unfamiliar with the student to avoid biases. Third, and most of all, the administration of thoughtful formative assessment has the potential to prepare students for external examinations and potentially providing a greater context for external examinations to be interpreted within. Formative assessment has been shown to have notable positive effects on pupil attainment and can be structured in a way devoid of teacher bias. Given the evidence that single assessments of cognition can be affected by stress, sleep and other extraneous factors, there are benefits to repeatedly assessing smaller and more specific elements of knowledge or cognition in a way that complement single external assessments and benefit learning environments – as long as it can be done objectively and with minimal bias from educators.

 

Summary

We advocate for external assessments to continue to be the primary means of educational assessment in the UK. Switching to internal teacher-based assessment would set back attempts to reduce inequalities in the UK education system. Furthermore, we would argue that concerns about stress are surpassed by evidence of teacher bias and inaccuracies in internal assessments. There are additional benefits to students and teachers of summative or continuous formative assessment, but these are complements rather than substitutes for external examination. The content and format of external assessments, whether high-stakes or continuous, should continue to be re-evaluated in line with well-founded and methodologically rigorous research.