David Jesson

Early life

He was born in Hackney in 1935, the son of Frederick John and Florence Jesson and attended the University of Manchester and the University of Cambridge. He became a Maths teacher, teaching in several schools, state and independent. He taught at Charterhouse School and Lincoln Christ's Hospital School.

University

He started working at universities when he joined the University of Sheffield. At Sheffield he developed the contextual value-added system of school performance measurement. This involves looking at the relative improvement of pupils, not their absolute performance - how much 'value' has been 'added'.

In 1995 he joined the University of York as Professor in the Economics department. He works in the CPERM department, in the Department of Economics and Related studies, under Professor David Mayston.

His research

His work on 'value-added' performance came from the belief that working from absolute exam grades was too crude a measurement, as pupils from different backgrounds and schools found it much more of a challenge to gain the same grades as someone from a more privileged background. It was like comparing apples with pears.

Science education

In 2007 he found that 68% of all comprehensive schools - around 2,020 - do not offer the three separate science courses at GCSE, and that only one in 20 pupils at state schools take physics, chemistry and biology at GCSE.

Academically bright children

In a report in April 2008 for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, he found that academically bright children at comprehensive schools were likely to do better when there were more academically bright children at the same school. This was from data of more than 150,000 children, and involved his 'value-added' measurements. The higher the proportion of 'able' pupils, the better the value-added performance.

In November 2005, he reported at the Birmingham annual conference of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (which represented around 2,400 secondary schools) that pupils at private school in the top academic 5% were almost guaranteed to get three A-grades at A-level, yet for state schools only a third of the top 5% would get three A-grades. He called this a 'severe talent drain' in the state school system. In the same speech he said that Britain's future economic success depended on identifying and nurturing this top 5% of pupils. It had been calculated by tracking performance of pupils from 1999 to 2004.

Personal life

In 1965 he married Catherine Whitehead; they had three children. He lives in St Ives, Cornwall.