Educational research has been rather slow to absorb the implications of the ‘spatial turn’ that has been so influential across the social sciences (and the humanities) in recent years (for example, Warf and Arias, 2008). To be sure, there is a long and distinguished tradition of scholarship in comparative education, which has been concerned overwhelmingly with comparisons between different states (Crossley et al., 2007). More recently, interest has begun to grow in the analysis of educational issues at the supra-national level (for example, Ozga et al., 2011). However, the more complex geographies of spatial variation within national states, whilst implicit in much educational research, have much less frequently been analysed systematically (Taylor, 2009).

This relative neglect of the regional and more local scales in the geographical analysis of educational issues is surprising. Educational outcomes (such as levels of educational attainment, for example) exhibit distinctive spatial distributions (at these scales), as well as the much better recognised differentiations between social groups (defined most frequently in terms of gender, ethnic background or social class) or distinctive institutional contexts (such as type of school attended, for instance). Indeed, these different dimensions of educational differentiation are closely interlinked.

Equally, educational policies which are responsible for shaping the availability of educational opportunities also have impacts that are differentiated at the local and regional levels. Moreover, the effects of national-level policies continue to be mediated significantly at the local level, whether through local education authorities or individual schools and colleges. Equally, however, there are complex interactions between national policy initiatives and social and economic circumstances that produce outcomes that are inevitably differentiated between different local areas and, indeed, regions. Clearly, sorting out the effects of these various dimensions of sub-national, geographical variation in education poses complex analytical issues. One innovative approach to addressing some of these issues (at least in the context of the UK) is that proposed by David Raffe and his colleagues (1999), involving what they termed ‘home international’ comparison.

What is most immediately problematic about the use of these ‘home international’ comparisons in such political contexts is straightforwardly that their methodological basis is so crude. For example, the well-established limitations of PISA in providing a satisfactory basis for evaluating the effects of systems of educational provision are nowhere acknowledged (Goldstein, 2008). Similarly, comparisons of levels of educational attainment are frequently made without recognising the difficulties in constructing comparable data-sets for the different ‘home countries’ (Rees, 2012); or taking adequate account of the effects of differences in social and economic conditions between them (Gorard, 2000). Accordingly, if ‘home international’ comparisons are to be used as a method of policy evaluation – and, potentially, policy-learning (Raffe et al., 1999) – it is essential that they are conducted on an appropriately robust methodological basis.

One approach  to establishing this sort of robust methodological basis is through the conduct of ‘home international’ comparisons as what have been termed ‘natural experiments’. Hence, the adoption of a different policy in one ‘home country’ (the ‘treatment’ group) allows systematic comparison with another (the ‘control’ group), thereby enabling the delineation of the effects of the policy innovation, assuming, of course, that other differences between the two ‘home countries’ are limited or can, in some way, be allowed for in the analysis (generally, by means of statistical applications).

In this paper, we address this issue of the availability of appropriate data to make stringent ‘home international’ comparisons by drawing upon the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) – a large-scale birth cohort study of children born across the UK during 2000-2001, with data currently available up until they are seven years old. 

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