Impact of school resources and teacher pay across local authorities - a Regression Discontinuity Design

The coalition government has recently announced the creation of a disadvantaged pupil premium aimed at reducing the attainment gap between pupils from rich and poor families. A recent White Paper also announced a focus on recruiting and retaining high quality teachers, indeed it was called "The Importance of Teaching." Along with increasing school autonomy, both represent central themes of the new coalition government's schools policy. The proposed research project will address two research questions that are crucial to determining the likely success and appropriate direction of policies in these areas:

1) What are the effects of resources on pupil attainment?
2) How important are monetary rewards in the recruitment and retention of high quality teachers?

The first question is currently the subject of much disagreement amongst researchers, partly because school resources are often themselves determined by measures of educational need. The second question has also been the focus of recent research, with evidence showing the importance of relative wage levels to improving recruitment and retention outcomes. Evidence from the US and UK both further point to the importance of teacher quality in determining pupil attainment. However, there is currently little evidence connecting monetary rewards and the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers.

The proposed research will bring new evidence to bear on both of these questions, making use of the way funds are distributed across local authorities to account for differences in the cost of living. Specifically, although schools in the London area must pay teachers higher salaries to reflect a higher cost of living, these differences are not always fully reflected in funding differences across local authorities, e.g. both Haringey and Camden must pay teachers according to the same inner London salary scales, but Haringey receives a funding uplift of 9% and Camden an uplift of 28%. Such situations create potentially sharp variations in resources available to schools in neighbouring local authorities. Furthermore, in areas close to local authority boundaries, there is likely to be little difference in the cost of living. We will exploit such situations to estimate the effects of resources on attainment. We will first compare the level of spending per pupil and real resources (e.g. number of teacher) available to schools either side of local authority boundaries, controlling for other possible determinants of resources such as number of pupils eligible for free school meals. We will then examine the consequences of such differences in resources for pupil attainment, controlling for pupil characteristics and prior attainment. We will also test whether the effect of resources is higher or lower for disadvantaged pupils. This evidence will allow us to predict whether the pupil premium is likely to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor pupils.

To answer the second question we will exploit differences in teacher salaries across local authority boundaries. Teachers are currently paid according to centrally-negotiated pay scales, with higher pay scales in the London area. However, since such weighting applies to particular areas, teacher salaries can vary substantially across boundaries (e.g. a newly qualified teacher in Kingston-upon-Thames can currently expect to be paid £25,200, whilst a few miles away in Surrey they could only expect £22,600). The cost of living is likely to be very similar in areas close to such local authority boundaries, creating sharp geographical variation in real teacher pay levels. We will examine whether such differences in teacher salaries lead to differences in the recruitment and retention of teachers, and how this relates to average teacher quality. This will allow us to say whether monetary incentives are likely to be an effective tool in attracting and keeping high-quality teachers.

Who will benefit from this research?

Our research will examine whether extra resources can improve educational attainment, and the extent to which pecuniary rewards can be used to attract high-quality teachers. Given the creation of the disadvantaged pupil premium and the new government's focus on recruiting high-quality teachers, the results are likely to be of considerable interest to current education policymakers. Our results will thus also be of interest to academics working in these fields, both in the UK and beyond, and to members of the public keen to engage with the debate. We are likely to be able to predict the extent to which the pupil premium may narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor. We will also be able to provide high-quality evidence on the most effective strategies to recruiting high-quality teachers. Strong positive effects of pecuniary rewards would suggest that policymakers should focus upon teacher pay, whilst an absence of such an effect would suggest a focus on other factors such as the teaching environment.

Furthermore, our research findings will inform the development of a national funding formula and how schools could improve value-for-money in an era of tight budgets. The results are thus also likely to be of strong interest to education professionals.

How will we ensure they benefit?

This is a diverse set of potential beneficiaries. However, IFS has a consistent and strong track record in effective engagement with such audiences and we have used this experience and knowledge to construct a dissemination plan targeted at all of these groups.

We will hold a launch event to publicise the main policy implications of our research findings inviting all individuals on the IFS database, which includes over 2,500 individuals and several hundred public policy figures. We will produce a policy briefing explicitly detailing the implications of our findings, which will be concise, written in plain English and freely available on the IFS website. We will also produce an IFS 'press' release, which would go to interested journalists, as well as other interested parties, such as public, private and third sector organisations. This will further allow us to disseminate the findings via the print and broadcast media. Over the last year, there was an average of 600 references to IFS research in online and print media per month.

We will also exploit personal contacts to publicise the research findings to key policy advisors, civil servants and politicians, such as members of the Education Select Committee, who Sibieta has previously advised on education and school spending.

We will then further publicise our findings via online tools such as the IFS observations page and the IFS twitter account. These can be used as effective tools for influencing public debate at key moments, e.g. two IFS observations were recently the subject of online news articles on the Department for Education's website, including one explicitly related to school funding.

We will present the research findings at key conferences and seminars, targeting both policymakers, education professionals. For instance, in the past year Sibieta has presented research on school funding to groups such as the New Schools Network, Westminster Education Forum and Inside Government (all attended by a diverse range of policymakers and education professionals). We also plan to publicise our findings at academic conferences in the UK an beyond, particularly if they attended by non-academics, such as the Royal Economic Society conference.

To reach a wider academic audience we will ensure that our research papers, when published in working paper format, are widely disseminated. The IFS has a well-established working paper series and an easily-navigable web-site from which such papers can be freely downloaded. Last year, the IFS web page received an average of just over 100,000 visits a month.