Do Specialist Schools Add Value

The impact of different school types on the progress made by their pupils is an important topic, with especial relevance to the ongoing debate about the value of the specialist schools programme (see Chitty, 2001; Croxford, 2001). With the advent of detailed and exhaustive national value-added datasets it would seem that it should be a plain and simple matter to tackle these questions using objective information about the progress made by just about every pupil in the country in different types of schools. Unfortunately, like the truth, this is ‘never plain, and rarely simple’, and it is clear from some recent attempts to carry out this kind of analysis that issues of methodology are crucial and need to be debated in a public forum.