Four Errors … and a Conspiracy? The effectiveness of schools in Wales

Publication Summary

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the issue of using raw‐score indicators to compare the performance of groups of educational establishments. Despite the growth of sophisticated, some might say over‐sophisticated, ways of estimating the value‐added to a performance by an institution such as a school, raw‐score comparisons continue to be made by researchers, journalists and, most frighteningly, by policy‐makers. In Wales, whole programmes of improvement measures and targets have been predicated upon the unproved notion that schools in Wales are under‐performing, that students are ‘schooled to fail’, that the majority of secondary schools in Wales ‐‐ English‐medium comprehensives ‐‐ should be looking to English schools and Welsh‐medium schools for their models of improvement strategies. Similar forms of comparison have more recently been used to suggest that the compulsory learning of Welsh hinders the learning of other modern languages. The substantive purpose of this paper is to argue that all such comparison...