What is 'value-added' and is it important?

What is 'value-added' and is it important?

Ralph Lucas (Editor, The Good Schools Guide) gives expert video advice on: Where can I get a copy of a school's exam results?; Where can I get a copy of the school's OFSTED report?; What are league tables? and more...

It's a crucial measure for looking at how well a school is doing. It's a difficult measure to make and you will be presented with a figure which is just out of a black box, and you can't relate it to anything else. But certainly the government figures have been very carefully prepared and what they are telling you is, given these children coming into the bottom of a senior school or bottom of a primary school, are they doing as well as you would expect? They measure the difference between how well a child was achieving at the bottom and how well they've eventually achieved at the top. They'll always be a great spread, but on average, a good school should be doing better with children than you would expect. It's one way of off-setting the bias you might get in a school because the kids are bright, they're well-supported by their parents, whatever else in the background is there, which makes it easier for children to succeed. You can adjust for that and you can say, "Are we looking at a school which inspires and teaches well and gets more out of people than you have a right to expect?" It's a very good figure to look at. In many secondary schools in particular, you will also be able to look at their own value-added statistics and that may give you some feeling for which departments are doing well, but they're private and many schools won't show them to you. But they're worth seeing if you can get them.