Where research meets policy
Society Now talks to Professor Simon Burgess about the ESRC Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO), the importance of education and how CMPO research contributes to the public debate
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ith its remit to investigate the fundamental factors underlying public sector reform, and its expertise in economics, geography
and law, the ESRC Centre for Market and Public Organisation is right at the intersection of where academia meets government policy, contributing to public debate and informing policy-making. The centre’s director, Professor Simon Burgess, has an academic background which spans the breadth of research into markets and public services. He took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge and his PhD at Oxford before moving to Bristol. “I worked around unemployment, job tenure, vacancies and then moved on to study poverty and poverty dynamics, and income distribution. Related to that I looked at models of fertility, models of marriage and divorce and how labour market participation interacted with demographic decisions around getting married, having kids, getting divorced,” he says.
Education is important because the
growth of the economy depends on the skills of the people
Professor Burgess then studied public services and public service reform including incentives for civil servants, competition in schools markets and competition and choice in health markets. His current work investigates market-based education reforms such as school performance tables, school accountability, choice and competition, admissions and unequal access to high-performing schools. He also works on ethnic segregation in schools, and the educational performance of minority students. With such a broad field of expertise and interest,
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why specialise in education? “I think education is important because the growth of the economy depends on the skills of the people in the country. I think it’s important for equality in that the differences in human capital that people acquire seem to be a very important factor in determining how they do over their lives. And the link between people’s outcomes and their backgrounds – which I guess is social mobility – is mediated to a large extent through schools,” he says. Another pragmatic reason that Professor Burgess gives for his current focus on education is the access to meaningful datasets that are available to researchers, specifically the administrative dataset from the Department for Education – the pupil census which covers every child in state schools in England. “For
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every year of school life, all of a child’s attainment and various other characteristics are recorded and this is matched with other datasets – the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), ALSPAC (The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) and so on. That’s just an incredible treasure trove of information that we can use and was a big reason for my concentration on education,” says Professor Burgess. Much of his recent research has focused on school league tables and their effectiveness in informing schooling decisions. Although he believes the current league table system is far from perfect Professor Burgess believes it is useful compared to a world of not having any tables. “Clearly when people are choosing schools they are interested in a number of things. But in terms of identifying the ‘best’ school the work I’ve done with Rebecca Allen of the Institute of Education suggests that league tables are actually useful and they do help to predict how your child will do at the local schools your child could go to,” he says. More than that, Professor Burgess’ research finds that the league table system raises teaching standards throughout the education system. “My work with Deborah Wilson at the CMPO and Jack Worth, ex-CMPO, shows that league tables are useful in terms of accountability. When the Welsh Assembly Government decided to stop publication of school league tables it really had a significant negative effect on the performance of schools and children in Wales. Clearly league tables can be improved and I think in the UK government’s response to the Woolf report, their suggestions for changing them are reasonably in line with what Rebecca Allen and I proposed,” he says. But do school league tables encourage a form of segregation where parents move to be near a desirable school? “I think the core thing in terms of sorting out school segregation is not school league tables at all, it’s admissions codes for those schools. “Almost all schools use proximity as one of
the key factors to determine who can be admitted so if you didn’t have proximity there would be no congregating around the popular schools. Parents care about the academic attainment of schools and league tables provide information on which are the highest achieving but who actually gets into the school is a different question. I would favour some form of lottery – some form of random allocation – rather than proximity.” After many reviews, reforms and new policies, how is England’s education system faring? Is it better or worse than ten or 20 years ago? Professor Burgess cites the international benchmark PISA
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