Would you like the use the National Pupil Database for your research? Lorraine Dearden, Mike Treadaway, Dave Thomson and I are running our annual 3-day NPD training course this year in London from Monday 3rd August-Wednesday 5th August.
 
You can find out more and sign up for a place here: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/training/show.php?article=5810.
 
It is a computer-based course so we are limited to about 23 places.
 
There aren’t yet exact details of the sessions on the website yet but it is likely to be scheduled as follows:
 
Day 1 Monday:
Session 1 – Intro and the termly pupil census
Session 2 – FSP, KS1 and KS2
Session 3 – Improving the pupil socio-demographic measures in the NPD
Session 4 – Other sources of information on schools

Day 2 Tuesday:
Session 1 – KS4
Session 2 – How have measures in NPD changed over time and implications for longitudinal analysis
Session 3 – What happens after age 16 – KS5, ILP, HESA, WPLS
Session 4 – Availability of NPD in social surveys – MCS, ALSPAC, LSYPE and others

Day 3 Wednesday:
Session 1 – The evaluation problem, Difference and Difference-in-Differences approaches
Session 2 – Matching (both PSM and simple matching of pupils with the same expected attainment)
Session 3 – Evaluating school-level interventions using families of schools or contextual value-added approaches
Session 4 – Designing your research project
 
Before you sign up… remember that the NPD is *very* large and quite difficult to use. It isn’t generally possible to open up the database in Excel, so you need to be able to use a statistical package such as SPSS, R or Stata.