School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of student current achievement on student prior achievement, where the school effects are the school means of the…

The purpose of this article is to explore crossing differential item functioning (DIF) in a test drawn from a national examination of mathematics for 11-year-old pupils in England. An empirical dataset was analyzed to explore DIF by gender in a mathematics assessment. A two-step process involving the logistic regression (LR) procedure for…

There are long-standing achievement gaps in England associated with socio-economic status (SES), ethnicity and gender, but relatively little research has evaluated interactions between these variables or explored school effects on such gaps. This paper analyses the national test results at age 7 and age 11 of 2,836 pupils attending 68 mainstream…

We find an individual's rank within their reference group has effects on later objective outcomes. To evaluate the impact of local rank, we use a large administrative dataset tracking over two million students in England from primary through to secondary school. Academic rank within primary school has sizable, robust and significant effects on…

Suicide rates in prisons are high. Our aim was to investigate the contribution of imitative suicide to the prison suicide rate. We used Knox tests for space-time clustering in a case register of natural and self-inflicted deaths in prisons in England and Wales and model simulations to estimate the effect size. We found significant space-time…