University Technical Colleges - driving growth across the whole country and cultivating world-leading sectors?

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Evaluating school effectiveness is challenging, because parents can choose where to send their children to school. This causes a problem for researchers, because those choices are unlikely to be random. This means it is difficult to disentangle whether children's exam results are higher in some schools than others because those schools attract higher attaining pupils, or because they are able to push their pupils to achieve better results. The latter would indicate higher school effectiveness, while the former would not.University Technical Colleges (UTCs) are a recent addition to the landscape of secondary education in England. They are schools which operate in partnership with universities and local industry to provide high quality technical education to young people aged 14-18, aimed at "developing the engineers, scientists and technicians of the future". The aim of our project is to understand how successful this model is at achieving its aims. In particular, we plan to compare the outcomes of pupils attending UTCs with the outcomes of pupils who do not in order to understand whether UTCs help their pupils to achieve more qualifications and/or higher grades, and whether they are more likely to encourage their pupils to follow pathways to careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering or maths) occupations.The challenge here is that the pupils who attend UTCs are unlikely to be a random subset of all secondary school pupils in England. They may be more interested in STEM subjects anyway, for example, so we would not necessarily want to attribute a higher likelihood of studying STEM subjects at university amongst pupils who previously attended a UTC to the UTC itself, unless we were convinced that we were comparing pupils at UTCs with pupils at other schools with the same underlying propensity to choose STEM subjects (i.e. the same level of interest in science, technology, engineering or maths).To find pupils like this, we will compare students with similar backgrounds - particularly in terms of their prior attainment in science and maths - in areas that do and do not have access to UTCs. This way, we can compare pupils who appear similarly well equipped to undertake a technical education, some of whom had access to a school who could provide this and some of whom did not, to see whether those who attended UTCs have better outcomes in any way.As well as understanding the benefits of UTCs for pupils, we will also explore the benefits for their sponsors and for the communities in which they are based, to shed new light on the role these institutions may play in improving local and national economic growth.