Performance Assessment in the Education Sector: educational and economic perspectives

Abstract

The growth in importance of performance assessment in education over recent years has been linked with a concern to ensure that the service represents ‘value for money’. To date the absence of a satisfactory analytical framework has meant that questions of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘efficiency’ have been kept separate. An additional problem has been that, whilst there are many different outcomes which are appropriate for education authorities to pursue, conventional models handle these only one at a time. In this paper we use data on the 96 English LEAs to show how an underlying model allows authorities to be compared in terms of ‘efficiency’ when facing different environmental circumstances and utilising different resource inputs. The technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is first described in the context of an explanatory model, and then the results of applying this to the English LEAs are presented. As distinct from a league table’ analysis, DEA gives some indications of where improvements are to be sought. It allows for ‘trade‐offs’ between outputs of different types and provides a small but distinct peer group of ‘efficient’ authorities to which an ‘inefficient’ LEA can be compared. The efficiency measure used is ‘relative efficiency’ which arises from comparing the actual performance of an inefficient authority with that of others which can be used to model its environmental circumstances and resource inputs. A number of case studies are described. The limitations of the technique, and the caution required in interpretation, are discussed.