CEE DP 12 4 Post - 16 Educational Choices And Institutional Value Added At Key Stage 5 Claire Crawford

transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form other than that in which it is published. In the UK there has historically been a clear demarcation between the academic and vocational routes through education post-16. Generally vocational study is taken either on a part time basis or full time at Further Education colleges. Students who want to take academic qualifications such as A levels have the option to enrol in a school sixth form, a Sixth Form College or a general FE college. The FE route is therefore an important one through our educational system for both vocational and academic students alike. This research investigates which types of students choose to study at these different institutions and whether this choice matters for the achievement of educational outcomes. The report has a specific focus for comparability reasons. The primary interest is in A level qualifications, studied by 88% of 16-18 year olds in maintained school sixth forms compared to 82% in sixth form colleges and 14 % in general FE , tertiary and specialist colleges. Many FE students take a more diverse range of qualifications than 16-19 students in other forms of provision. This inevitably means that we are considering a subset of FE activities so this report does not provide an evaluation of the effectiveness of FE colleges per se. Whilst this is not such an issue with sixth form based provision, the conclusions about FE colleges should be considered in the context of the broader evidence base on their performance, in terms of their more comprehensive offer to individuals and communities. In summary, FE students are far more diverse than students in other forms of provision and hence there are significant challenges in comparing the performance of FE colleges and other institutions, even when we restrict the comparison to those taking A levels. In an attempt to cover more of the FE College offer we widened the scope of the analysis to include A-levels and equivalent level 3 qualifications. These qualifications are studied by 93% of 16-18 year olds in maintained school sixth forms compared to 91% in sixth form colleges and 52% in FE colleges. There are methodological problems with including these qualifications in a value added model that uses standard regression which are well covered in the …