How do parents react to news about school quality?
Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, regularly inspects state schools in England and rates their quality from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. These ratings give parents information on the quality of education schools provide – but research into the effects of this system has mostly concentrated on how Ofsted reports affect parental school choices and house prices.
We wanted to ask a different question: once a child is at school, how do parents react when they get news about the quality of their school through an Ofsted rating? In particular, we looked at whether the amount of time parents spend helping their children with school work changes. Does a better than expected Ofsted review motivate parents to invest more time in their children? Or do they reduce that time if they learn the school is doing a good job?
Using the data
We used a unique combination of survey data from Understanding Society with administrative data on Ofsted inspections and school performance between 2009 and 2015. Household interviews and school inspections can both take place in any month of the year, so we were able to have a control group (households interviewed before their school was inspected) and a treated group (interviewed after inspection). In other words, we could compare households that knew the outcome of the inspection with those who didn’t.
We could also examine whether parents changed the amount of time they invested in their children, and if it went up or down. In Waves 1, 3, and 5, Understanding Society asked “How often do you help your child/children with his/her/their homework?”, with five possible answers:
- almost every day
- at least once a week
- at least once a month
- less than once a month
- never or hardly ever.
Because Understanding Society also interviews 10-15-year-olds, we could see how the children responded, too, in terms of the amount of their own time they invested in homework. Finally, we linked the Understanding Society data to three administrative datasets:
- Ofsted inspections: date of inspection and outcome
- School Census data: type of school, and characteristics of the student body
- Department for Education tables on schools’ academic performance.
Results
We found that parents who receive good news about the quality of the school their child attends are significantly more likely to reduce the amount of time they invest in helping their children with school work. Parents receiving good news are around 23 percentage points more likely to reduce help with homework. In contrast, when parents receive news of a lower than expected Ofsted rating, their time input does not change – they do not respond by increasing their help at home.
Taken together, these results mean that parents who receive good rather than bad news about the quality of their child’s school are 29 points more likely to reduce the help they give their children with homework and 19 points less likely to increase it. Parents with children in schools that receive good news react more strongly than parents whose children are in schools that receive bad news.
Ofsted inspection results are also likely to reduce the difference in how much parents help their children across schools in England. This is because good schools (often with highly motivated parents) are more likely to receive more good news about school quality, leading to lower investments by parents. This makes the help received by children in good schools more similar to that received in lower-performing schools.
When we looked at children’s own time investments, we found that, if anything, they tend to react to bad news. Children in households that have received bad news about their school rating seem more likely to increase the time they spend doing homework, though the results are not statistically significant.
But do Ofsted ratings have an impact on test results? We found that children whose families got good news early in the academic year performed significantly worse in their GCSE exams compared to those where the good news came later in the academic year, indicating that the reduced help by parents lowered children’s exam performance. This suggests that the Ofsted inspection regime lowers educational attainment overall for those children who are inspected in the year of their high-stakes formal exams, such as GCSEs.
Conclusion
What we’ve learnt gives us a new perspective on the effects of Ofsted inspections, beyond the simple matter of house prices, and helps us to start understanding how some of the different factors driving exam results interact with each other.
As things stand, Ofsted inspections make parental investment in helping children with schoolwork more equal. However, they do this by reducing those investments of time when a school does better than expected, not by increasing them for lower-performing schools. The latter would surely be the more desirable option.
The research suggests a new approach to understanding school inspection. If there is further investigation of how the country frames and targets information about schools, and the specific information provided, it may be possible to make the education system more efficient – and to help teenagers develop and have greater wellbeing.
The research could also help other countries – especially middle and lower income countries – as school inspection regimes are rolled out around the world.