Modifying school choice for more equitable outcomes in England

The aims of this project were to document current secondary school admissions criteria in England, explore the role of these criteria in perpetuating inequalities between richer and poorer students, and model the likely effect of reforming these criteria.

The research found that most secondary schools in England use geographic over-subscription criteria to determine which students are admitted if the school becomes over-subscribed. These geographic arrangements incentivise parents to compete for access to “popular” (typically more effective) schools through the housing market, which can price out poorer families.

Also, inequality of access to effective schools by Local Authority was strongly associated with the proportion of schools using geographic admissions criteria. The impact of imposing geographic admissions criteria had a much more negative effect on the effectiveness of available schools for poorer families than more affluent ones.

To understand the effects of reforming school admissions arrangements, the project modelled three alternative options:

• An FSM quota that reserves a quota of school seats for pupils eligible for FSM.
• Marginal ballots which reserves a quota of school seats for any pupil outside the traditional catchment area of the school, and allocates these at random if the quota seats are over-subscribed.
• And banding, where existing admissions criteria are used to assign students to school seats, within four ability bands.

In all three options, schools’ existing criteria continue to play a large role in admissions, providing continuity to schools and parents, while expanding access.

An FSM quota leads to the biggest improvement in access to effective schools for students eligible for FSM, while minimising disruption to the sector. A 15% quota leads to almost all FSM-eligible students being allocated to their most preferred school, effectively removing access constraints for this group. The gap in effectiveness between FSM and non-FSM-eligible students falls by 16%. At the same time, around 94% of students remain in the same schools, school composition changes marginally for most schools and students’ home-school distance barely increases.

The project therefore concluded that FSM quota strikes a good balance between expanding access to effective schools to poorer pupils and maintaining the benefits of “community” schools for most students.