ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the previous two chapters, over the last few decades successive UK governments have sanctioned the development of an increasingly sophisticated suite of school effectiveness measures for schools in England. As a result, schools now have access to value-added metrics that utilise advanced statistical techniques, drawing on many years of international School Effectiveness Research designed to provide robust and reliable measures of the value added by individual schools to the academic outcomes of their students. Through their publication in school PANDA reports, their incorporation into the Pupil Achievement Tracker and as part of the development of RAISEonline, school leaders and classroom teachers are actively encouraged to use these value-added measures to evaluate their institutional and personal effectiveness. Schools have become data-rich environments equipped for an era of ‘intelligent accountability’ (Miliband 2004). However, as we have also discussed, Miliband’s phrase ‘intelligent accountability’ also refers to another agenda; that of using value-added measures to hold schools and teachers accountable for the educational outcomes of students. The original, raw attainment metrics – typically, the proportion of pupils crossing the particular threshold of 5+ A*–C grades at GCSE – were developed for publication in School Performance Tables, more commonly known as ‘league tables’, and have always been used by Ofsted for accountability purposes. As more refined and sophisticated value-added measures have been developed, these too have been adopted for accountability purposes: Ofsted uses them to inform pre-inspection hypotheses and schools are ranked by value-added scores in league tables published by the national news media.
