About the project

The HARPS project is investigating the effects of the socio-economic, gender, ethnic, SEN and age composition of school intakes on school processes and student progress in Hampshire primary schools. By composition we mean the mix of students in a school and our interest is in, how the dynamics of this mix of students may have an effect on their outcomes over and above the social characteristics they bring to the school. It will explore how such ‘compositional’ effects 'work' by looking at pupil cultures and the influence of student intake on classroom processes, including groupings, the school curriculum, teaching, organization and management. The project also aims to look for school policies and practices that especially help improve student progress in schools given particular kinds of student intake.

The study began with the Year 3 cohort in 2004 and has studied their progress through to the end Year 4 in July 2006. It involves: a large-scale statistical analysis of data from all Hampshire full primary and junior schools (data will be collected when the cohort is in Year 3 and again in Year 4), a study of a sub-sample of 46 schools in and around Basingstoke and Deane and more detailed case studies of 12 of these sub-sample schools. The HARPS project is a collaboration between the University of Bath, Bristol University's Centre of Multi-Level Modeling, London’s Institute of Education,, Hampshire LA and Hampshire primary schools. It is funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and continues. Data collection has now been completed and the analysis is ongoing - see the outputs page.