About the research
Socio-economic indicators – which are commonly and freely available – are often used to allocate benefits or education programmes to schools or pupils in the absence of observing actual educational disadvantage – which is costly and rare.
This report documents the value of socio-economic indicators in predicting educational disadvantage, with the aim of improving the targeting of public resources and improving educational outcomes.
The report also shows the correspondence between school-level socio-economic indicators, which allow interested parties to compare the characteristics of schools along various dimensions. Another important output for the project is a ‘ready reckoner’ (or look-up table) that can be used to compare school-level socio-economic indicators which are commonly used but not often compared.
The findings suggest that a pupil’s eligibility for free school meals is the best predictor of educational disadvantage. This implies that charities that hope to address educational disadvantage should use this socio-economic indicator in the absence of observing actual educational disadvantage. Some other socio-economic indicators perform reasonably well (such as neighbourhood deprivation), while others perform poorly (such as quintile of local rates of participation in higher education).
On the basis of this study’s findings, the educational charity Teach First considered changing their eligibility criteria for schools. They later reconsidered, however, as the introduction of the new benefit system, Universal Credit, will affect eligibility criteria for free school meals.
Methodology
The researchers constructed a measure of educational disadvantage using the detailed characteristics of pupils and their parents available from the LSYPE; factors such as the parents’ education and engagement and household income were included in principle component analysis. This measure of educational disadvantage was correlated with various socio-economic indicators to determine the (commonly and freely available) indicator that best matched the underlying measure.
School-level socio-economic indicators were created using information from the 2012 census of pupils in state schools in England. Correlates of all school-level indicators were produced and summarised in a ready-reckoner.
Publications
The research findings were published in the following research report:
Crawford, C. and Greaves, E. (2013). A comparison of commonly used socio-economic indicators: their relationship to educational disadvantage and relevance to Teach First (IFS Report No. R79), London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. doi: 10.1920/re.ifs.2013.0079 Retrieved 28 August 2013 from ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/r79.pdf
This study has received coverage in the following media:
Vaughan, R. (15 March 2013) ‘Teach First misses some of those most in need’, TES Magazine.