Diversity in the provision of the key public service of secondary education through different types of school is a feature of the English educational system. Much of this diversity has emanated from the distinctively different roles which Local Education Authorities have played in the development of the type of schooling for their areas. The 1944 Education Act described the resultant educational system as a ‘national service locally delivered’. However, one aspect of this diversity, the continuing existence of grammar schools selecting an ‘able’ minority of pupils, remains a contested issue. Whereas over ninety percent of secondary age pupils are educated in ‘comprehensive’ schools, a few areas have retained selection of ‘more able’ pupils for grammar school education - along with its concomitant allocation of the others to secondary modern schools.Selective grammar schools have typically been given a high ranking in published league tables of schools’ examination results, a fact which has led to claims that these schools offer the best education for pupils. The emergence of statistical techniques making more sophisticated comparisons between such schools and others has been the motivation of the present paper. It compares the performance of able pupils in grammar and other types of school using value-added techniques on a pupil-level basis using recently available national datasets. In addition it considers the performance of ‘selective systems’ of educational provision for all the pupils in selective areas , compared with what occurs in fully comprehensive systems of educational provision. The paper finds no evidence for the superiority of either grammar schools nor selective systems of educational provision; indeed any advantages appear to lie with those schools and systems organised on non-selective lines.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of York in its series Discussion Papers with number
00/52.
Length: Date of creation: Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:yor:yorken:00/52
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom Phone: (0)1904 433776 Fax: (0)1904 433759 Email: Web page: http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/econ/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Michael Shallcross).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)