Relationship between School Attendance Support and Academic Performance:An Analysis of Panel Data from Adachi Ward

The aim of this paper is to perform quantitative analysis about the relationships between receipt status of school financial support and student’s characteristics such as academic performance, obesity, home-learning conditions, everyday attitudes towards learning, and academic performance and physical capabilities. Focusing on all pupils and students attending Adachi ward (Tokyo) public elementary schools and junior high schools, we construct panel data by linking two surveys (“The Survey on the Physical Capabilities of Pupils and Students, and the “Adachi Comprehensive Survey of Acquisition of Basic Academic Skills (conducted from second year of elementary school until third year of middle school), which was independently conducted by Adachi ward in 2009–2017) to pupil/student name registers (list of school-age children) with information about application for and receipt of school attendance support. Even having controlled for pupils’ and students’ fixed-effects, the results of this analysis reveal the possibility that pupils and students who are continuous beneficiaries of public assistance may be put in circumstances with difficulties to learning. We find that, pupils and students who are not eligible for national public assistance but receive municipal school attendance support are in better conditions in terms of overall academic performance and home-learning compared to pupils and students that are continuous beneficiaries of public assistance. Regarding the relationship between academic performance and physical capabilities, it was revealed that, having controlled for pupils’ and students fixed-effects, there is a high probability that there is a positive correlation between physical capabilities and academic performance, and a negative correlation with obesity.