Background
This research uses Understanding Society data to investigate how parental investments into children’s education interact with school investments. Learning about the drivers of parental investments into their children is important for the design of educational interventions.
Methods
We use Ofsted inspections of children’s schools as a treatment that reveals information about school quality to parents. We exploit random variation in the timing of Ofsted inspections within an academic year, where some parents receive information about school quality through an Ofsted inspection before their survey interview (treatment group) and others receive this information after their interview (control group). In a first stage we predict Ofsted grades based on school characteristics and performance data and compare them to actual inspection outcomes, creating variables of positive or negative ‘shock’. In a second stage we estimate how parental investments react to positive and negative shocks in a difference-in-difference framework using Understanding Society data. Our measure of parental investments is how often parents help their children aged 10-15 with homework, and we combine several waves of Understanding Society to assess changes in parental help with homework.
Results
We find evidence that parental effort decreases as school quality improves so there is crowding out of private investment by public investments. The results indicate that parental and school investments are substitutes.
Team members
Ellen Greaves, Senior Research Economist, Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS)
Dr Iftikhar Hussain, Lecturer in Economics, University of Sussex
Dr Birgitta Rabe, Senior Research Fellow, ISER, University of Essex
Professor Imran Rasul, Professor of Economics, University College London