Institute of Education/Bristol - GCSE tables aid school choice

Parents may be right to use GCSE exam league tables to choose schools, a new study suggests. Academics from the Institute of Education, University of London, and the Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, studied the entire cohort of half a million children who had to choose their school in 2003 and used extensive data to find out how they did in their GCSE exams six years later. The researchers found that a child who attended the top-rated school in their area was likely to outperform their peers at less prestigious schools, and unlikely to do worse than those at lower-ranked schools. The findings were published in a report, Evaluating the Provision of School Performance Information for School Choice.