Most policy debates addressing educational issues focus on primary and secondary education. When higher education is considered, it is often through the narrow angle of university attendance and completion. Yet, most students do not follow an academic track, and most importantly, most of them do not go to university. In England, about 60 per cent of a typical cohort enrolls in post-compulsory institutions qualified as 'further education colleges'. Most of these students attend general/tertiary further education colleges, which provide some form of vocational or technical training. For various
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Most policy debates addressing educational issues focus on primary and secondary education. When higher education is considered, it is often through the narrow angle of university attendance and completion. Yet, most students do not follow an academic track, and most importantly, most of them do not go to university. In England, about 60 per cent of a typical cohort enrolls in post-compulsory institutions qualified as 'further education colleges'. Most of these students attend general/tertiary further education colleges, which provide some form of vocational or technical training. For various reasons, this sector has historically been under-considered by academics and policy makers alike. This briefing note fills some of the knowledge gap by investigating the role of principals in further education (FE) colleges.
The study uses a novel panel dataset of principals in FE institutions in England over the period 2003 to 2015, and combines it with data on students' education performance. It also exploits the information contained in the Staff Individualised Records (SIR). To estimate the importance of principals, we exploit the fact that we observe principals and colleges over time. We therefore see a given principal in different institutions, and a given institution managed by different principals. We focus only on the outcomes of young, publicly funded learners that can be linked to their past education performance (who did their GCSE exams between the years 2002 and 2014). We proceed in two steps to investigate college principals' role. First, we look at whether principals do matter for students' educational performance. The three achievement outcomes we use are whether the student achieves a Level 2 qualification, whether the student achieves a Level 3 qualification, and whether the student enrols in any kind of Level 4 - or above - qualification. Then, we investigate potential mechanisms that could explain principals' performance, in particular recruitment and wage policies set by the principals. The results show that principals do matter for the educational performance of their students. Most importantly, principals notably differ in their ability to enable students to progress.
Edited excerpts from publication.
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