Aspirations, Expectations and Education Outcomes for Children in Britain: Considering Relative Measures of Family Efficiency

We apply the distance function methodology to the analysis of household production functions. In particular, the family’s ability to efficiently and simultaneously generate a dual education (mathematics and reading) output for their child subject to multiple, constrained input availability is addressed. A stochastic production frontier model is estimated and significant shortfalls from the productive ideal are established, indicating that there is substantial scope for improvement in the production of childhood education outcomes amongst British families. There is also substantial variation across families in the efficiency of their production. Implementing a conditional mean model, inefficiency is shown to be strongly related to both family and child-centric variables and, in particular, to the educational aspirations of the parents for their child.