Welfare distribution of collective in-kind transfers in education: an application to the extended schools programme

ABSTRACT

In this study, we employ the distributional characteristics approach to analyse the welfare distribution of the Extended Schools Programme, a social programme that fights inequality in Northern Ireland’s public schools. Our main result is that increasing funding to schools as their size increases penalizes the most deprived students. This is because the school size, although related to the educational supply, does not reflect the distribution of deprivation within schools. Thus, although in the Northern Irish context the largest welfare gains are possible if funds are redistributed among middle-size schools, our general result indicates an excessive support of small-size schools at the expenses of large-size schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational equality
• welfare distribution
• in-kind transfers
• full-service schooling

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I24
• I320
• I38

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Department of Education Northern Ireland for providing the data employed in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The percentage variation of the funds between the ORP and the ESP moves from negative to positive as long as the school size increases: −0.45 (<200 pupils), −0.05 (200–400 pupils) and 0.54 (>400 pupils).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a grant from the Department of Agricultural, Environment and Rural Affairs Northern Ireland, Evidence and Innovation Project 15/2/05: Developing a More Effective Rural Proofing and Rural Champion Model.