# Effects of summer schools: Who benefits the most?

## TL;DR

This study examines if summer schools in the Netherlands help reduce educational inequality, especially for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

## Contribution

The study evaluates the impact of summer schools on math performance across different socioeconomic groups using administrative data and advanced statistical methods.

## Key findings

- Participation in summer schools has a modest overall effect on math performance.
- All socioeconomic groups benefit, but the lowest and middle groups see weaker improvements compared to the highest group.
- Summer schools may not significantly reduce educational inequalities when not targeted at low-SES students.

## Abstract

This study investigates whether publicly funded summer school programs in secondary education are of substantive meaning for the math performance of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. More specifically, we explore whether this is the case when the summer programs are not explicitly aimed at low-SES students. In this context, we investigate whether summer schools in the Netherlands can decrease inequalities of opportunities in education. We use administrative data from Dutch secondary schools. To analyse the effect of the intervention we apply a Difference-in-Difference analysis in combination with matching estimation techniques. The results indicate that there is an overall modest effect of participation in a summer school. When analysing the SES groups separately, we observe a positive effect of participation for all three SES groups. However, the effect seems less strong for participants in the lowest and middle SES group compared to the highest SES group.