School-Performance Indicators, the Local Residential Environment, and Parental Choice

The results of unadjusted national tests are to be used as school-performance indicators to monitor school effectiveness and to form part of the basis on which parental choice will operate. In this paper, it is argued that educationists, in their desire to show that schools matter, have reinforced the arguments of the political Right, often unintentionally, and have neglected the effects of the social geography of catchments. On the basis of past and present research findings, it is argued that any adjustments to the indicators need to consider the effects of the local environment and perhaps parental choice itself, as well as prior attainment and social class. The impracticality of making such adjustments, the difficulty of establishing a standardised effect of local environments across the country, and the problems of disentangling school effects from those of social geography, cast great doubt on the use even of adjusted indicators as a meaningful basis for parental choice. These indicators, as one of the major mechanisms in the newly constructed education system by which schools will compete for pupils and resources, are thus seriously flawed.