School spending: what do we know?

Education is one of the most important services that the government provides. But until recently there has been very little hard data about schools in the public domain, other than league tables. Last month, the Department for Education made a major contribution to the government's transparency agenda with the release of detailed spending data for English schools in 2009-10 . This allows much more public scrutiny of the education system. Parents can hold their local school and education authority to account, compare them with next door neighbours, and uncover national trends revealing best practices across the country. That analysis can help shape the policy debate. The TaxPayers' Alliance has released a statistical study of the data for secondary schools . It shows that there is clear evidence of a significant pupil premium already in the system. Areas with more students on free school meals tend to spend more per pupil. Unfortunately they aren't able to translate this into results, and overcome the difficulties of working with more deprived students. There is little correlation between pupil funding and academic achievement. The study also raised important questions about supply teaching. It turned out that there was much more use of supply teachers by schools in deprived areas, suggesting that the pupils who need stable teaching the most do not get it. In the current environment we can't afford to spend money blindly. It needs to be used in the most effective way to benefit pupils and analysis of this spending data shows that the key to improving schools is not simply throwing money at them. Policy makers and head teachers need to look at the schools which achieve strong results with fewer resources and learn from them. More broadly, it's crucial that other government departments release data sets like this so the debate about public services can be as informed as possible. That way "evidence based policy making" can become more than just a catchphrase. Simon Cook is author of the Taxpayers Alliance analysis of secondary school spending The full data is below . What can you do with it? Download the data • DATA: spending per school, 2009/10 • DATA: SUMMARY - spending and results by school (Google Fusion tables) • DATA: local authority summarised More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world's government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world's global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at [email protected] • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook