A study of the effects of school size and single‐sex education in English schools

Abstract

National value‐added datasets have recently become available that record a pupil’s progress from Key Stage 2 right through to GCSE. Such a dataset is clearly a useful tool for assessing the impact various characteristics of secondary schools have on pupil performance. This paper reports on a research project which involved the use of a variety of statistical techniques, including multi‐level modelling, to explore the impact of single‐sex education and school size on pupils’ progress and opportunities. The analysis suggests that single‐sex education is particularly beneficial to girls in comprehensive schools and to boys in selective schools. Furthermore, girls’ schools were found to counter traditional sex‐stereotyping in subject choices. In terms of school size, the results show that medium‐sized schools obtain slightly better results than very large or very small schools. The paper concludes by exploring alternative explanations of the identified effects.

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