Educational attainment and social disadvantage: Contextualizing school league tables

The Education Reform Act of 1988 has had major implications for educational provision in England and Wales and subsequent legislation in 1993 has reinforced weak forms of parental choice which began with legislation in the 1980s. The legislative changes of the 1980s have given a prominent role for publishing non-adjusted tables of examination performance at school level both for accountability purposes and to aid parental choices. The present paper draws on previous research and case studies for school catchments in South Wales to bring census data much closer to school level data, producing a much closer fit of performance results to social indicators at aggregate scales. The results at these levels point to the need to bring together those agencies holding pupil-level data and agencies which hold school level data to allow multi-level approaches to contextualizing school performance results.