§ 58. Mr. Alan Howarthasked the Secretary of State for Education and Science whether he makes any assessment of the correlation between expenditure per pupil in schools and examination results; and if he will make a statement.
§ Mr. Chris PattenStatistical Bulletin 13/84 "School Standards and Spending: statistical analysis" presented an analysis of the statistical associations between the examination attainments of maintained school leavers in a local education authority, and measures of socioeconomic background and broad-based school and resource variables.
The analysis showed that certain measures of socio-economic background were highly associated statistically with examination achievements, and there were much smaller, but statistically significant, correlations with other explanatory variables including measures of teaching and non-teaching expenditure per pupil. In three of the six attainment measures tested, teaching expenditure was found to be positively associated with achievement and in two of these cases non-teaching expenditure was found to be negatively correlated. In one instance, the proportion 47W of school leavers gaining no graded O-level or CSE results, non-teaching expenditure was found to have a positive statistical association.
The only work which the Department has undertaken at the level of the individual school took account of resources in terms of pupil-teacher ratios, expenditure figures in respect of schools not being available. For only one of the examination measures did the pupil-teacher ratio appear to have a significant relationship. In this case, a small positive relationship with examination results was observed.