One of the key problems for poor neighbourhoods is the bad educational outcomes for children that live there. As I have argued before, the evidence suggests that traditional regeneration programmes (with a strong focus on the built environment) don't do much to address this problem. So will the government's proposal to pay teachers more for working in the most disadvantaged schools (themselves generally in the most disadvantaged areas) fair much better?
The answer is that we don't really know. There isn't much strong evidence of a link between teacher pay and student outcomes. But these "golden handcuffs" are targetting recruitment and retention rather than pay per se. Unfortunately, we know even less about the extent to which this might affect educational outcomes. Intutively, it feels like it should matter, but there is little, if any, evidence to back up this intuition.
Even if the policy does work, it will not do much to affect the spatial concentration of poor educational outcomes. This is because about 60-70% of the variation in educational outcomes is down to pupil background, with only about 10% attributable to the school and even less, if any, to the neighbourhood. The fact that we have evidence that school matters more than neighbourhood at least argues that this is a move in the right direction. But the overwhelming importance of family characteristics and the spatial concentration of poor families, means that the targetting of disadvantaged schools can only ever do so much to improve poor education outcomes in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
CEP Urban and Spatial Programme Blog (formerly SERC)
