Very much agree! I remember working on a round of the expansion programme (DfE officials were so opposed to it, it was unreal, but we got the extra money - £1m, from memory - in the end). Like Duke of Edinburgh, it's something that can have such positive outcomes and great for more children of all backgrounds to have access to it.
I agree that attending sea cadets seems likely to be a very good thing (helping community groups collect and analyse data to make similar cases is what I do for work) But, that PSM study is nonsense.
They control for things like gender, pupil premium etc, but they don't control for the unmeasurable "willingness to sign up and attend structured activities in my free time" which is intuitively massively correlated to school attendance.
A far better approach would be to look at a difference in differences by area when sea cadets open new locations, or to do an intention to treat analysis by randomly advertising the cadets in particular areas/schools.
Very much agree! I remember working on a round of the expansion programme (DfE officials were so opposed to it, it was unreal, but we got the extra money - £1m, from memory - in the end). Like Duke of Edinburgh, it's something that can have such positive outcomes and great for more children of all backgrounds to have access to it.
If only the economy was 4% bigger maybe there would be tax money to pay for this!
I agree that attending sea cadets seems likely to be a very good thing (helping community groups collect and analyse data to make similar cases is what I do for work) But, that PSM study is nonsense.
They control for things like gender, pupil premium etc, but they don't control for the unmeasurable "willingness to sign up and attend structured activities in my free time" which is intuitively massively correlated to school attendance.
A far better approach would be to look at a difference in differences by area when sea cadets open new locations, or to do an intention to treat analysis by randomly advertising the cadets in particular areas/schools.