Away from Home, Better at School. The Case of a British Boarding School

In this paper we study whether substituting family inputs with school resources in an academically oriented environment has an impact on achievement in high-stakes national examinations. We use administrative data for England to estimate the effect of attending a selective boarding school that admits an unusually high share of pupils with low socio-economic status on attainment at the end of compulsory education. By using propensity score matching we obtain comparable control groups in selective non-boarding schools. Our main finding is that the probability of being in the top decile of achievement in the exams increases by about 18 percentage points compared to 59% for controls.