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FT Magazine:
How politicians poisoned statistics

14 April 2016

The frustrating thing is that politicians seem quite happy to ignore evidence - even when they have helped to support the researchers who produced it. For example, when the chancellor George Osborne announced in his budget last month that all English schools were to become academies, making them independent of the local government, he did so on the basis of faith alone. The Sutton Trust, an educational charity which funds numerous research projects, warned that on the question of whether academies had fulfilled their original mission of improving failing schools in poorer areas, ''our evidence suggests a mixed picture''. Researchers at the LSE's Centre for Economic Performance had a blunter description of Osborne's new policy: ''a non-evidence based shot in the dark''.

This article was published in the FT Magazine on April 14, 2016
Link to article here

Related publications
Academy schools and pupil outcomes, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin. Article in CentrePiece Volume 20, Issue 2, Autumn 2015
Academies 2: the New Batch, Andrew Eyles, Stephen Machin and Olmo Silva, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No.1370, September 2015
The Introduction of Academy Schools to England's Education, Andrew Eyles and Stephen Machin, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No.1368, August 2015

Related links
Andrew Eyles webpage
Stephen Machin webpage
Olmo Silva webpage
Education and Skills Programme webpage

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