Evaluation of neighbourhood, class setting and academy school effects on education outcomes in the UK

This thesis includes three chapters that explore contemporary topics within the area of education in the UK.

The initial empirical chapter examines whether living in a deprived neighbourhood impacts upon the probability of obtaining the benchmark GCSE outcomes, when adopting a propensity score matching methodology. The chapter also examines whether there is a differential impact of neighbourhood deprivation upon children with educated parents, relative to those with uneducated parents. The results show that living in a deprived neighbourhood negatively influences the probability of gaining the observed GCSE outcomes; individuals with educated parents lose out to a greater extent by living in a deprived neighbourhood, relative to individuals with uneducated parents.

The subsequent chapter examines whether setting, which involves separating children into classes based on ability, influences the attitudes and behaviours of primary school children. A fixed effects methodology is initially adopted to identify the impact of being set in maths; the results signal that the behaviour of girls may be improved by setting. The chapter also investigates whether the level of the maths set in which the child is sorted influences behaviour by adopting an instrumental variables approach to overcome the likely endogeneity issue surrounding the set placement. The results indicate that whilst internalising behaviour was improved for girls placed in the lowest set, this set placement was detrimental to the internalising behaviour of boys.

The final chapter analyses the impact of post-2010 primary converter academies on pupil progress. Adopting a difference-in-difference methodology, individuals who experience academy conversion are compared with those whose school converted after leaving from the same school year cohort. The results indicate that converter academies had a positive impact upon pupil progress. When examining the effect by neighbourhood deprivation, the positive impact of converter academies is more consistent for schools in the least deprived neighbourhoods.