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An evaluation of the National Healthy School Standard (NHSS) was undertaken by the authors on behalf of the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills. One part of the evaluation involved gaining access to a number of datasets derived from previous research and analysing the health-related outcomes of schools which had attained Level 3 of the NHSS, compared with those of other schools. The sources which provided the most interesting findings were the Health-Related Behaviour Questionnaire (HRBQ) survey and the Ofsted database of school inspection ratings. This paper describes the statistical methods used, and the results of the HRBQ and Ofsted analyses. Using HRBQ data, many pupil-level outcomes were explored, but relatively few indicated significant differences and even those tended to be quite small. The Ofsted school-level data yielded stronger evidence of NHSS impact. The paper concludes by suggesting possible reasons for these findings.

Schools are important settings in which to promote children's and young people's physical and emotional health. An evaluation of the National Healthy School Standard in England showed that education and health professionals have implemented a range of projects and activities to improve pupils' health. Although these were generally well received by parents and pupils, they were not uncritical of them. Perceptions of the value of health-related work were influenced by the contextual characteristics of schools--whether primary or secondary, the quality of social relationships, the quality of teaching, and the extent of pupil and parental involvement in the life of the school. With local responsibilities for children's services in England being reorganized in response to the Green Paper, "Every Child Matters: Next Steps," there are new opportunities to develop a coherent set of outcome measures that pay due regard to pupils and parents views, and which inform collaborative reviews of healthy school programmes, in particular, and local services, more generally.

The advent of large-scale matched data sets, linking pupils' attainment across key stages, gives new opportunities to explore the effects of school organisational factors on pupil performance. Combined with currently available sophisticated and efficient software for multilevel analysis, it offers educational researchers the chance to develop objective evidence about issues both old and new. Previously reported research, based on separate data sets from Key Stage 2 1997 to Key Stage 3 2000 and Key Stage 3 1998 to General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) 2000, focused on the impact of selective, specialist and faith schools. We now have access to a national data set with 380,000 pupils' Key Stage 2 levels in 1996 matched to their GCSE performance in 2001, and this has enabled us to rework these analyses based on value-added results across all five years of secondary education. Results of the analysis largely confirmed the findings of previous work, in terms of the apparent impacts of different school types on pupils' progress. The article emphasises the important contribution that the marriage of national matched data sets and multilevel modelling will continue to make to educational research.

National value-added datasets have recently become available that record a pupil's progress from Key Stage 2 right through to GCSE. Such a dataset is clearly a useful tool for assessing the impact various characteristics of secondary schools have on pupil performance. This paper reports on a research project which involved the use of a variety of statistical techniques, including multi-level modelling, to explore the impact of single-sex education and school size on pupils' progress and opportunities. The analysis suggests that single-sex education is particularly beneficial to girls in comprehensive schools and to boys in selective schools. Furthermore, girls' schools were found to counter traditional sex-stereotyping in subject choices. In terms of school size, the results show that medium-sized schools obtain slightly better results than very large or very small schools. The paper concludes by exploring alternative explanations of the identified effects.