Lancashire Value Added in Schools Project

The Lancashire Value Added project (1992-2007), in Collaboration with Lancashire Local Authority, provided an on-going innovative system of secondary school evaluation and teacher self-evaluation via the confidential feedback of student performance and attitude data from teachers; parents and students.

Over the last nine years the project has developed to incorporate a number of different types of GCSE/GNVQ value added feedback; in terms of assessing student outcomes in different subject areas as well as the whole school; for different student groups (such as high and low attainers) and over different time periods (in 2001 over 40 measures were provided).

The methodology employs 'state of the art' statistical techniques including multilevel modelling.

Key findings are reported in
Thomas, S.M. (2010) Evaluating Schools as learning communities. Chapter in McGaw, B, Peterson, P and Baker, E (Eds) International Encyclopedia of Education (3rd edition). Elsevier.
Thomas, SM, Peng, W-J, & Gray, J. (2007) Value added trends in English secondary school performance over ten years Oxford Review of Education, 33 (3: 261 - 295). ISSN: 0162-3737
Thomas, S (2001) Dimensions of Secondary School Effectiveness: Comparative Analyses Across Regions, School Effectiveness & School Improvement. 12 (4):285-322.