School Roll Forecasts: Their Uses, Their Accuracy and Educational Reform

SUMMARY Recent research has indicated the isolated development of school roll forecasts in each local education authority of Britain, each using similar methodology but with wide variations in data intensiveness, resources, documentation and responsibility for production of forecasts. This paper reviews the nature of this variation and the reasons for it. The current restructuring of schooling in Britain directly limits local scope to plan educational provision; the changing role of forecasting is reviewed. The paper develops measures of forecast accuracy that are related to the costs of inaccurate forecasts and applies these measures to data from a variety of local education authorities. The accuracy of complex and more simple models is compared. The accuracy of headteachers' estimates of their future school rolls is compared with centrally prepared estimates.