Royal Statistical Society - South West Local Group Meeting
Wednesday, 7th October, 3pm Room: BGB409
George Leckie
University of Bristol
In England, so-called `league tables' based on examination results and test scores are
published annually, ostensibly to inform parental choice of secondary schools. A crucial
limitation of these tables is that the most recent published information is based on the
current performance of a cohort of pupils who entered secondary schools several years
earlier, whereas for choosing a school it is the future performance of the current cohort
that is of interest. We show that there is substantial uncertainty in predicting such future
performance and that incorporating this uncertainty leads to a situation where only a
handful of schools' future performances can be separated from both the overall mean and
from one another with an acceptable degree of precision. This suggests that school league
tables, including value-added tables, have very little to offer as guides to school choice.
This is joint work with Harvey Goldstein.
Leckie, G. and Goldstein, H. (2009) The limitations of using school league tables to inform
school choice. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, 172(4).
Goldstein, H. and Leckie, G. (2008) School League Tables: What can they really tell us?
Signi
cance, 5(2), 67{69.
All Welcome
Tea will (hopefully) be served after the talk
Julian Stander
