Nothing special about 'specialist' schools

Specialist schools, a key plank in the education strategy to raise secondary standards in Britain, are no more effective than other state schools, according to new analysis of this year's GCSE results, released yesterday.

The government has consistently maintained that Britain's specialist secondary schools - which place extra emphasis on a particular subject area, are given extra government funding and benefit from private sponsorship - help to improve pupil performance.

Provisional results of a study by researchers at Staffordshire and Cambridge universities, suggest the GCSE performance at arts, business, languages, mathematics, technology and science schools is no better than that of other state secondaries, while the performance of specialist sports schools is actually slightly lower.

'What we have found so far is that being a specialist school does not seem to make any substantial difference to exam performance,' said Geoff Pugh, professor of applied economics at Staffordshire University Business School, one of the study's authors.

'Our results so far simply do not bear out the quite substantial claims that the government has made for it,' he said.

The researchers presented their findings yesterday at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association in London's Institute of Education.

The study also found that additional funding only marginally helped to raise school performance in the five years from 1999 to 2004 and the effect of spending additional money in specialist schools was no different from the effect of spending extra money in other secondaries.

Despite an extra GBP500 spent on each (HK$7,875) pupil, the percentage gaining five or more A* to C grades has risen by only 1.5 percentage points.

The research used data from every secondary school in England and Wales, and was controlled to discount the effect of a wide range of factors such as selectivity, the number of absences and the number of special needs children in each school.

The findings contrast sharply with a study published last year by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which found that specialist schools performed better than non-specialist schools and the performance improved the longer the school was part of the specialist schools programme.

David Crossley, director of achievement networks at the SSAT, said yesterday that its research showed that in the past year specialist schools and academies averaged 60 per cent five good grades (A*-C) at GCSE compared with 48 per cent for non-specialist schools.

The drive to create academies, which are given more autonomy and are aimed at pupils in socially disadvantaged inner city areas, and specialist schools is part of the government's agenda to create greater freedom and flexibility for the majority of schools 'with a view to creating a wholly specialist comprehensive system', according to the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which was set up this summer by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

UK school debate

Analysis shows investments in specialist schools may be futile

Extra money the government and private sector invest in each specialist school pupil GBP500