On the equity aspect of the ‘quasi-market’ in educational services: the case of the North-West region in England

Abstract

This paper considers the equity aspect of the educational reform in English secondary education. By using data from the School Performance Tables in the North West region of England, two indices of equity measurement, the ‘dissimilarity index’ and the Gini coefficient, are calculated. From the results, it is found out that the disparity between schools in the region has not been a serious problem so far.

Acknowledgements

This paper was written mainly when the author was doing research at the Department of Economics, Lancaster University Management School. The author expresses many thanks to Jim Taylor and Steve Bradley for their kind and helpful suggestions. Of course, the remaining errors are all the responsibilities of the author.

Notes

See, for example, Bradley and Taylor (1998, 2002), Bradley et al. (2000), Bradley et al. (2001), Glennerster (2002), Taylor and Bradley (2000).

The analysis by Bradley and Taylor (2002) is one of the exceptions among the quantitative analyses of the equity aspect. However, even this study does not consider the direct estimation of the equity problem. They have used the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals as an index of equity, and have stated that ‘the adverse effects on equity appear to be relatively small in magnitude’ (Bradley and Taylor, 2002, p. 311). Of course, there are many research studies which consider the equity problem in a descriptive way. About those analyses, see, for example, Glennerster (1991) and Bartlett (1993).

Vandenberghe (1998) has used the ‘dissimilarity index’ to examine the effect of the ‘quasi-market’ on educational services in Belgium.

The Gini coefficient is formally defined as the following: ‘(T)he Gini coefficient is defined as half of the arithmetic average of the absolute differences between all pairs of (e.g.) incomes ( y), the total then being normalized on mean income (μ ):

’ (Barr 1998, p. 151).

The author expresses many thanks to HMSO for granting permission to reproduce the data in the School Performance Tables.