User:Pluke/PF/long

With any system to which change is applied, you must find a way to measure the impact of that change. Many of the current methods used to rate schools are attached to examination grades. These grades can be manipulated for the sake of government initiatives and league tables, leaving students with an environment which is school focused, rather than catering for their needs. This short article will look at a possible way of measuring the longitudinal success of school leavers. The aim of education is too large a debate to adequately cover here, but I will attempt to give a short description of how we could judge schools through students who have left them.

Statistics about NEETs are prevalent in the news right now and I believe that the reverse of a NEET, someone who is in Education, Employment and/or Training (EET), could be used to define a successful school. By delivering statistics on EETs you could see the effectiveness of institutions in preparing young adults to become productive members of society, without the having to apply judgements that use a hierarchy of careers or educational institutions. Career path information could also be possible here, but I don’t believe it to be as important.

How could we go about measuring this? Universities are ranked by the career prospects of their alumni and many schools boast about the Universities that their students go to. However, University rankings are based upon voluntary surveys and there is no fixed way to link a school student to the same university student, or link a school student to the same person in a career 5 years later. http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/league-tables/key/ http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_pubs&task=show_pub_detail&pubid=1714&Itemid=286 http://www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2250&Itemid=286 – talks about source being a survey

When a student starts school they are tracked by a Unique Learner Number (ULN), this follows them throughout their education as a way of matching an academic record to an individual. Once they leave school this is no longer applicable, but from the age of 16 they acquire a National Insurance Number, which will link a individual to a career. If we could link these two unique numbers together then we could track those students who are EETs, providing school statistics that reflect on how well schools prepare students for the real world. However, there might be a few issues around using this model (with probably a few more I’ve missed):

It might be possible to contextualise school figures with local area figures, to see if students from a school perform better than a local trend, this would negate both of these issues and give an indication of how well schools can change the lives of their students.
 * How would the system cope with stay at home parents, housewives and househusbands? Would this measure discriminate against a school with student cultural backgrounds favourable to these life choices?
 * How much impact does a school have on the EET rate of students when it might be situated in an area of high unemployment? Would the results punish schools for their location?

Other more significant problems that this might face:
 * What would be the IT costs of implementing something like this and the other technical stumbling blocks? Quite probably with separate Government IT systems storing ULN and NI data, how costly would it be to connect the two systems together?
 * What would knowing the EET rate of students who have left a school 7 years ago tell you about the school now when schools can change drastically in a single year?

As much as I like the idea of longitudinal tracking, the final point is a difficult one to overcome. If it could give a good picture of how well a school prepares its students for life, is EET the best measure? Would all attempts at longitudinal tracking be nullified by the rapidly changing fortunes of our schools?