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Do Private Schools Manage Better?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alex Bryson  and
Francis Green
Alex Bryson
Affiliation:
UCL, NIESR and IZA
Francis Green*
Affiliation:
UCL and LLAKES
*
corresponding author: e-mail francis.green@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

There is a perception among some commentators and policy analysts that leadership and managerial practices in private schools are superior to those in state schools. Analysing a survey of workplaces in Britain, we find little evidence to support this contention when examining the prevalence of modern human resource management (HRM) practices in schools. Rather, the evidence points to greater use of such practices in state schools. Those practices are correlated with improved school performance in the state sector, but not in the private sector. We discuss the implications of these findings for the policy of encouraging managers of private schools to sponsor state schools.

Keywords

school performancehuman resource managementI21
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 243 , February 2018 , pp. R17 - R26
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

Acknowledgements: Alex Bryson thanks the Nuffield Foundation (grant EDU/41926) for funding. Francis Green acknowledges support from the ESRC-funded LLAKES Centre for Research on Learning and Life Chances (grant ES/J019135/1). The authors acknowledge the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research as the originators of the Workplace Employee Relations Survey data, and the Data Archive at the University of Essex as the distributor of the data. We thank seminar participants at UCL and NIESR for useful comments on earlier versions of the paper. The views expressed are those of the authors, and all errors and omissions remain the authors' sole responsibility.

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