14 Schooling
Ask me my three main priorities for government and
I will tell you: education, education, and education— Tony Blair (1996)In 1966 the US government published the famous Coleman
Report, chaired by the celebrated sociologist James Cole-
man. It argued that the main cause of children’s academic
success was the attitude of their parents. Without a change
in this, the report argued, schools had limited ability to make
a difference. This view was supported by plenty of research
that showed that the measured characteristics of teachers
made little difference to the academic success of their pupils.
The counterattack was rapid and ingenious. A young
researcher called Eric Hanushek asked, What about the
unmeasured characteristics of the teacher? Why not investi-
gate simply how much difference it makes whether you are
taught by Mrs. X, rather than Mr. Y. So he replaced the mea-
sured characteristics of teachers in the Coleman analysis
by a string of variables, which simply reflected the name of
the teacher. It turned out that which teacher children were
taught by explained a substantial proportion of the variance
in their test scores.^1
In this chapter we investigate the impact of the different
schools and teachers in the Avon area on the outcomes of
the children they taught. We begin by investigating the role
of the whole school— what difference does it make which
school you go to? And we start with secondary schools.