Since 2000, government spending on schools has increased steadily and there has been a continuing improvement in the proportion of pupils getting good qualifications at age 16. Yet attainment gaps between pupils from different backgrounds remain.
MiSoC’s Birgitta Rabe and Cheti Nicoletti (University of York) studied school inputs, such as how much money is spent per pupil and staff/pupil ratios, to analyse their effects on pupils’ educational attainment at the end of compulsory schooling, and the differences in returns to school inputs across children with diverse backgrounds and attainments. They looked at what happens in a secondary school if it spends an extra £1,000 on each pupil per year. Using data from the National Pupil Database including test scores, they asked which pupils benefit from extra spending and which groups gain most from different types of spending (such as, for example, teaching staff, education support staff, administration, ICT equipment, other learning resources and catering).
They found that school inputs are more productive for children that were more able at the end of primary school, confirming that there are ‘dynamic complementarities’ in the production of cognitive skills. This result has important implications for the allocation of school resources across school phases, suggesting that more funding spent in earlier years has multiplier effects later on.