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

评估学校的有效性具有挑战性，因为父母可以选择将孩子送到哪里上学。这给研究人员带来了一个问题，因为这些选择不太可能是随机的。这意味着，很难弄清某些学校的儿童考试成绩高于其他学校，是因为这些学校吸引了成绩更好的学生，还是因为它们能够推动学生取得更好的成绩。大学技术学院（UTCs）是英格兰中等教育领域的新成员。这些学校与大学和地方工业合作，为14至18岁的年轻人提供高质量的技术教育，旨在“培养未来的工程师、科学家和技术人员”。我们项目的目的是了解这种模式在实现其目标方面的成功程度。特别是，我们计划将参加UTCs的学生的结果与未参加UTCs的学生的结果进行比较，以了解UTCs是否有助于学生获得更多资格和/或更高的成绩，以及它们是否更有可能鼓励学生走上STEM职业道路这里的挑战是，参加UTCs的学生不太可能是英格兰所有中学学生的随机子集。例如，他们可能对STEM科目更感兴趣，因此我们不一定要将以前参加UTC的学生在大学学习STEM科目的可能性更高归因于UTC本身，除非我们确信我们正在将UTCs的学生与其他学校的学生进行比较，这些学生具有选择STEM科目的潜在倾向（即对科学、技术、工程或数学的兴趣水平相同）。为了找到这样的学生，我们将比较有类似背景的学生--特别是他们以前在科学和数学方面的成就--在有机会和没有机会进入UTCs的领域。通过这种方式，我们可以比较那些看起来同样具备接受技术教育的能力的学生，其中一些人可以进入可以提供这种教育的学校，而另一些人则没有，看看那些参加UTCs的学生是否在任何方面都有更好的结果。除了了解UTCs对学生的好处之外，我们还将探讨其赞助商和他们所在社区的好处，以揭示这些机构在促进地方和国家经济增长方面可能发挥的作用。

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.