A number-crunching study from academics at the Institute of Education, London, and the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO), Bristol University, shows that when parents use league tables to inform their choice of secondary school, their child is more likely to do better in their GCSEs.
"Parents should use GCSE performance information to choose schools," conclude Dr Rebecca Allen of the IOE and Professor Simon Burgess of Bristol. "We find that using performance tables is better than choosing a local school at random."
The findings will surprise sceptics, who argue that raw exam league tables simply reflect the make-up of a school's population and may not be useful in predicting how one particular child might do there. For example, a school with good results might simply attract high ability pupils. Sceptics also point out that there is a six-year gap between school choice and a child's own GCSE exams, and schools can change a great deal in this time.
Allen and Burgess studied the entire cohort of half a million children who had to choose their school in 2003 and used the extensive data available to find out how they actually did in their GCSE exams in 2009. They compared each child with similar local children who chose a different school. This enabled them to evaluate whether picking the school at the top of the local league table in 2003 was likely to have been a good choice for the child who took their GCSEs in 2009.
"A child who attends the highest performing school within their choice set on 2003 data will turn out to do better than making a choice at random twice as often as they will do worse," say the researchers.
Perhaps surprisingly, raw outcome performance tables outperform more sophisticated tables, such as those which attempt to show the "value added" to children's scores by the school.
The analysis is detailed in a CMPO discussion paper entitled "Evaluating the provision of school performance information for school choice".
Allen and Burgess found that league tables are most useful for students who have to choose among schools with very different levels of performance. When differences between local schools are minimal, league tables are not particularly helpful in predicting a child's future academic performance, they say.
"Another surprise is that the best GCSE performance information is only slightly more useful in school choice than knowing the average ability of pupils entering the school," say the authors. "We believe that this is because the demographic profile of pupils strongly influences the school's ability to attract high quality teachers, headteachers, governing bodies, unpaid volunteers, teaching assistants, and other resources.
"To be clear, our argument is not that school composition is all that matters directly and teaching quality not at all; rather, we argue that teaching quality matters a great deal, but that averaged over a number of years, this is strongly influenced by school composition."
They recognise this is "not a comfortable conclusion", because of the implication that it is not rational for a middle class parent to pick a deprived school, even if it is doing well. They believe this situation could be overcome through policies which work harder to equalise school intakes, or which enable deprived schools to attract more resources.
"The obvious policy reform would be to mandate local authorities to publish exam performance data alongside admissions information in the school admissions brochures sent to parents of 10 year-old children. This should improve the chances that more disadvantaged families use this performance information, and will make no difference to the choices of advantaged families who already incorporate this information into their decisions."
However, poor families will not benefit without reforms to the school admissions system "so that students from these disadvantaged families can actually access the schools that they might choose on the basis of the performance data", Allen and Burgess conclude.
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