School quality and parental investments into children

Presenter: Birgitta Rabe, ISER, University of Essex

Author: Birgitta Rabe

Co-author(s): Ellen Greaves, Imran Rasul and Iftikhar Hussain

This paper uses Understanding Society data to investigate how parental investments into children’s education interact with school investments. Learning about the drivers of parental investments into their children is important for the design of educational interventions. We use Ofsted inspections of children’s schools as a treatment that reveals information about school quality to parents. We exploit random variation in the timing of Ofsted inspections within an academic year, where some parents receive information about school quality through an Ofsted inspection before their survey interview (treatment group) and others receive this information after their interview (control group). In a first stage we predict Ofsted grades based on school characteristics and performance data and compare them to actual inspection outcomes, creating variables of positive or negative ‘shock’. In a second stage we estimate how parental investments react to positive and negative shocks in a difference-in-difference framework using Understanding Society data. Our measure of parental investments is how often parents help their children aged 10-15 with homework, and we combine several waves of Understanding Society to assess changes in parental help with homework. We find that having a higher than predicted Ofsted grade leads to an increase in help with homework, whereas a lower than predicted Ofsted grade leads to decrease in help with homework, although the latter finding is not statistically significant. The results indicate that parental and school investments are complements.