Aspirations, expectations and education outcomes for children in Britain : considering relative measures of family efficiency

The distance function methodology is applied to the analysis of household production functions in this study. In particular, the family’s ability to efficiently and simultaneously generate a dual education (mathematics and reading) output for their child subject to multiple, constrained input availability is addressed. A stochastic production frontier model is estimated and significant shortfalls from the productive ideal are established, implying substantial scope for improvement in the production of childhood education outcomes amongst British families. There is also considerable variation across families in the efficiency of their production related to both family and child-centric variables. Implementing a conditional mean model, inefficiency is further shown to be strongly associated with the educational aspirations of the parents for their child