We study the market for teachers in England, in particular teacher turnover. We show that there is a positive raw association between the level of school disadvantage and the turnover rate of its teachers. This association diminishes as we control for school, pupil and local teacher labour market characteristics, but is not eliminated. The remaining association is largely accounted for by teacher characteristics, with the poorer schools hiring much younger teachers on average. We interpret this market equilibrium allocation as either deriving from the preferences of young teachers, or as reflecting the low market attractiveness of disadvantaged schools.
An effective higher education market should increase educational standards. For universities to fulfil this role, students need reliable information about the teaching on offer at different universities, but no such data are currently available. We define a measure of teaching that weights contact hours by their intensity and collect a new data set that allows comparison of teaching across universities and across three departments.No two universities offer identical teaching. There is large variation in contact hours and even larger variation in teaching intensity, across both universities and departments. We combine our data with existing data to investigate the relationship that teaching has with university and student * Submitted October 2015.This project benefited from funding from the Centre for Markets and Public Organisation (CMPO) through ESRC grant number ES/H005331/1. The authors are grateful for comments from seminar participants at New College of the Humanities, ISER (Essex), LEER (Leuven) and AEDE (Madrid). They are also grateful to Gill Clarke (for bringing to their attention the appendices to the Robbins Report) and for comments from Jack Britton, Olga Gdula, Ellen Greaves, Nick Hillman, Maria Fiscal Studies characteristics. We find that how much teaching students receive is uncorrelated with tuition fee; that teaching has little predictive power in explaining student satisfaction; and that physics students consistently receive more teaching than either economics or history students.
Policy pointsr In contrast to many dimensions of quality (for example, research reputation), it is difficult for prospective students to benchmark universities in terms of the teaching provided. This results in an important informational market failure.r We propose an input-based metric that weights contact hours by teaching intensity and makes it possible to compare teaching delivered in different ways at different universities. Many universities already hold the administrative data required to construct this metric at the subject level.r There is large variation in the teaching received both between and within subjects. Students receive 2.3 times more teaching in physics than in history and 2.9 times more than in economics. The ratios of maximum to minimum teaching provided across universities are 21.6, 6.4 and 25.8 for economics, history and physics respectively.r We argue that our proposed measure can complement existing metrics to increase transparency and improve student choice.A competitive and dynamic higher education sector needs students who actively and regularly challenge universities to provide teaching excellence and value for money.
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