The neglected issue of using profit efficiency for the best-practice benchmarking of UK universities is explored to see whether this supports the policy stance of encouraging more specialized university production. The article also investigates whether nonparametric modelling with financial...

Current education policy in the UK requires secondary schools to strive for 'effectiveness' or 'best-practice' performance in producing educational outcomes, while securing cost efficiency in input use when doing so. Given this double policy objective, the present study uses data envelopment...