Select Committee Inquiry on the Purpose and Quality of Education: NFER Response

01 January 2016

In January 2016, NFER submitted written evidence to the Education Committee inquiry into the purpose and quality of education in England. The inquiry addressed three questions: what the purpose of education for children of all ages in England should be; what measures should be used to evaluate the quality of education against this purpose; and how well the current education system performs against these measures. NFER’s response addressed the second and third questions: measurement and success.

We began by offering some core principles of measurement within the education sector, before providing an overview of some more specific measures relevant to the types of response we anticipated others making to question. Our key recommendation was that if, as a society, we expect our education system to deliver more than purely academic achievement, then we should be investing in higher quality, formal measurement of these other objectives.