Why do secondary school admissions rules matter?

In an age of academies and free schools, secondary schools in England have never had more freedom over their admissions rules. But how do they decide who gets in and who doesn’t? And does it really matter?

These are the issues explored in this podcast, featuring Professor Simon Burges (Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol) and Dr Ellen Greaves (Honorary Research Associate at the University of Bristol). 

Discussing their research, Simon and Ellen shed light on the complexities of England’s secondary school admissions rules today and show that fairer admissions criteria could have a huge impact – on children, families and our whole society.

Learn more: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/secondary-school-admissions/

Transcript

00:00:05 Host

How do secondary schools in England today decide which pupils get in and which don't? And what are the consequences of these admissions rules, not just for children and their families, but for our wider society? 

00:00:16 Host

These are just some of the questions explored in this podcast by Professor Simon Burgess – Professor of Economics at the University of Bristol, and Doctor Ellen Greaves – Honorary Research Associate at the University of Bristol, as they discuss their research on the economics of education.

00:00:36 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, Simon, you've done so much work in economics of education research. What drew you to the topic?

00:00:42 Prof. Simon Burgess

Well, I have to say – in the first instance – it was simply that there was suddenly a lot of great data available. And – as you know – data is the raw material of what we do, and suddenly there was the opportunity with this brand-new dataset to do a lot, a lot, a lot. 

So, after a while, the importance of the questions and how important education and pupils and teachers are for our society – kind of – really drove it further on.

00:01:09 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, when we started the current project, how would you describe the state of play? What did what did we already know about these questions?

00:01:17 Dr Ellen Greaves

I think a fair amount was already known on what schools historically had done in terms of pupil admissions. But there was a lack of evidence – research – on what schools were currently doing. Now that most schools are academies and can control their own admissions criteria, what have they chosen to do?

And I think there's also lacking evidence on what the effect of their policies – their chosen policies – might be, which will be the next stage of our research.

00:01:44 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, the rise of academies is really a game-changer for school admissions isn't it – it's changed everything?

00:01:51 Dr Ellen Greaves

Well, that was the hypothesis – that since academies and free schools have control of their own admissions, they might choose to be doing interesting, innovative things – moving away from the traditional geography-based admissions criteria. 

But actually, what we found is that academy schools, in particular, seem to have stuck with the norm – stuck with geography as their main admissions criteria. So not so much of a game-changer as we were thinking.

00:02:15 Prof. Simon Burgess

Hmm, indeed.

00:02:18 Dr Ellen Greaves

So out of all the many things, what do you think is the most exciting aspect of our research?

00:02:22 Prof. Simon Burgess

Well, I think there's a lot of exciting things still to come in later stages of the project. But I mean so far, the most exciting – the most important part – I think of the work is the data we've collected on what schools actually do.

So this is brand new, as you know – you've been doing a lot of the collecting – and this is going to really transform our knowledge of what happens when people are choosing schools, which schools they can choose, which they can't, which schools they don't live near enough to get into. 

00:02:52 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, I think the most exciting thing is that we are going to be able to do so much with all of this amazing data on schools. 

So, we can put that data on schools together with data on families and what schools they choose, given their constraints, and I think that's going to be transformational.

00:03:09 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes, I agree. 

It's the first time that the two have been put together – the data on schools and the data on families – and also the first time we've got such rich data on schools – the actual catchment areas, the actual precise criteria.

00:03:22 Prof. Simon Burgess

I mean it's taken us 18 months, right? I think? So, it really ought to give us something at the end of that.

00:03:27 Dr Ellen Greaves

Hopefully, it’s worth the pain!

00:03:30 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, Simon, once we've finished our project how do you hope – or think – that our findings will affect things in practice?

00:03:37 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, I think it's really important to me that the research that we do – that this project and other ones – actually make a difference to the world. So, I think in this particular project, there's a very clear line of sight from what we do to policies and practices out there in the world. 

00:03:53 Prof. Simon Burgess

As we've been talking about, schools now set their own admissions criteria. So, if they can see some evidence from us that change in what they do would be beneficial to society – and in particular to children coming from poorer families – then there's a way that we can argue with them to try and do that. 

00:04:12 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, what do you see as the as the opportunities for impact from our work – for changing the world?

00:04:18 Dr Ellen Greaves

Maybe not the world! Maybe school admissions in England and then, hopefully, social mobility. So, we feel that if we can make access to quality or effective education more equal, then maybe we make longer term outcomes more equal and affect social mobility. 

00:04:35 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, I do really hope that once we have concrete evidence on the effect of different admissions criteria on who goes where – who ends up with certain exam grades and so on – that that will give evidence to schools – to policymakers – about the effect of reforming their admissions criteria. 

00:04:54 Dr Ellen Greaves

And already we've had conversations with people from other local authorities about the likely effects of changing admissions criteria, and I'm really excited that we're going to be able to say something concrete and causal about the effect of any changes.

00:05:09 Prof. Simon Burgess

Yeah. And we've presented our work so far to the Department for Education – made some contacts there – so there's definitely scope for doing that, I think. 

And you're right, inequality is such a big issue these days. And a lot of inequality of incomes depends on inequality of education. So, if we can make a small change in that, then I'll be really happy.

00:05:31 Dr Ellen Greaves

Simon, why do you think we have such a segregated school system in England?

00:05:35 Prof. Simon Burgess

That's a very good question and I think it's a very long-lasting problem that we're dealing with here. And obviously, where people live – residential segregation – is part of that story. People live in different communities – slightly richer, slightly poorer, as well as more diverse communities.

00:05:52 Prof. Simon Burgess

But I think that the thing that really does this for schools is, indeed, the admissions criteria. And as we found, almost 90% of secondary schools in England have some kind of geography as a key admissions criterion – so catchment areas, or the distance from the school, how far away you live from the school. 

00:06:12 Prof. Simon Burgess

And that implies – as has been backed up by countless research papers – that if certain addresses give you a ticket into the popular school, then those addresses are going to become more expensive. So, you kind of get this selection through mortgage – that the houses that will get you entry into the most popular or most high performing schools are more expensive. And so that allows certain people in and keeps certain people out. 

00:06:41 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, it's that kind of system that we see is across our school system – that kind of admissions programme – that I think is responsible for quite a lot of the income segregation.

00:06:51 Dr Ellen Greaves

It probably reinforces existing neighbourhood segregation in some way.

00:06:56 Dr Ellen Greaves

What do you think about the alternative? 

The most common alternative we have in England is the selective system – the grammar school system – which is present in a handful of local authorities. What do you think about the effects of that on segregation?

00:07:10 Prof. Simon Burgess

The grammar school system – obviously very, very controversial. 

It actually has 2 effects. So, in terms of segregation in schools – those are the most segregated schools we have – state schools we have – in the country. Very, very segregated by design, you know, if you pass a test – you go to these schools, if you fail the test – you go to these schools. 

00:07:31 Prof. Simon Burgess

But it does – sort of – paradoxically allow people, therefore, to choose where they live without that constraint of having to live near the school. 

So, the residential segregation – you know, in terms of where people actually live – is a little lower in highly selective areas. But the school segregation is much, much higher – and by design – that's not an accident. 

00:07:53 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes. So, if you're moving away from geography, moving towards selection by ability is not the answer.

00:07:58 Prof. Simon Burgess

Yes, that’s not the answer.

00:07:59 Dr Ellen Greaves

And it's interesting that around the world, there are cases of countries going from one to the other – either moving from geography to selection, or selection to geography. And neither seems to solve the problem of reducing segregation in schools.

00:08:14 Prof. Simon Burgess

No, we need a school admission system that – to some degree – kind of divorces your chance of getting in from anything to do with your family income.

So, either paying for an expensive house or paying for tutoring – those kind of things – we need to somehow, for some places, in some schools – take those out of the equation.

00:08:34 Dr Ellen Greaves

Ok. So, we haven't got geography and if we can't do selection by ability, how do you think we should prioritise pupils across schools?

00:08:43 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, I think there are a number of different things we could do, but I think – I also want to say – that we probably need a mixture of these things. So, I don't want to completely get rid of all geographical aspects in terms of school admissions – maybe we can talk about that later on. 

But I think we need to introduce some other ways of doing this – that are not brand new – but are used around the country and around the world to try and give people who don't live near the school – give them a chance.

00:09:12 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, I guess there are two main ways in England that that happens – and neither of these are common at all. 

One of them is to have some random element – a ballot, a lottery, however you want to describe it –  that says we have 10 places and – you know – 30 children have applied for those places so we're just going to pick 10 names out of a hat. So, everyone has an equal chance. So that's one idea. 

00:09:34 Prof. Simon Burgess

Another idea is ‘banding’. So again, the children take a test but this time – rather than just taking the ones who score the most – schools will take children from all the different parts of the test score outcome. So, they'll take some high performers, middle performers and low performers – as an idea of trying to – sort of – guarantee that they have a diverse ability intake into the school. 

00:09:57 Prof. Simon Burgess

When we think about this – you know, the geographical aspect of admissions to schools – for some very, very popular schools you have to live really near the school to have a chance of your child getting in. So, our argument is that that reduces access from some families to getting into those schools. 

00:10:13 Prof. Simon Burgess

But you know, we have to recognise – it has to be said – that there are some positives as well because it gives us a sense of community to the school. If all the children going to the school live near it and they live near each other – then the children can play together, do their homework together, share lifts. There's lots of advantages. 

00:10:30 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, what we're saying here is that there are two sides to this. There is – lots of geographical aspects of admissions reduces equality of access to the school, but it does generate a sense of neighbourhood.

00:10:44 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yeah, I agree – there's definitely a trade-off there. 

And I also think that the appropriate admissions criteria might depend on the context. And so, I think banding can work really well in inner London – where it predominantly is – because students can very easily travel to neighbouring schools and the second closest school might only be a few hundred metres further away. So, it doesn't increase travel time – with the transport system – it doesn't increase congestion. 

00:11:13 Dr Ellen Greaves

And so, I think systems where pupils are shuffled around a bit more work – probably will work – better in more urban environments with better public transport.

00:11:22 Dr Ellen Greaves

Another thing I think that could work and could kind of solve this trade-off – by preserving catchment areas, neighbourhood admissions and allowing access – is something like the Pupil Premium criterion. 

00:11:36 Dr Ellen Greaves

So currently around 5% of schools prioritise pupils that are eligible for the Pupil Premium – in general a marker of low income. And so it could be that schools have, for example, 10% of their places – a quota –reserved for pupils that have the Pupil Premium, and then maintain their existing admissions criteria for other pupils.

00:11:56 Prof. Simon Burgess

Yeah, that was one of our really surprising findings, wasn't it? I think surprised everybody – that from 2014 schools have been allowed to give extra priority to disadvantaged children. And I think we were all expecting to see quite a lot of that in the data. Turns out hardly any schools do that. 

00:12:17 Prof. Simon Burgess

And we're still kind of mulling over why that might be. There are different ideas, but I'm not sure we've got to the bottom of it yet. But I mean as a fact – it's there as a fact, so we'll have to think more about that.

00:12:29 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes.

00:12:30 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, school admissions. So, getting into a school is important. Why? Why is that? Why does it matter what school you go to?

00:12:38 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, then there is evidence that how effective your school is will determine your test scores, and there's a correlation between your test scores at the end of school and then what you go on to do later in life – so your employment opportunities and so on. 

00:12:55 Dr Ellen Greaves

There's also emerging evidence that the composition of your school – who your peers are – affects not only your educational ability, but also wider outcomes across a whole range of things – so your prosocial behaviour, your generosity, whether you choose to have an interracial marriage even. 

00:13:15 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, I think that there is very strong evidence that the school’s effectiveness matters for your education, and therefore your later life outcomes. And there's also emerging evidence that having a segregated school system – not mixing between students – might have negative consequences for more general outcomes as well.

00:13:32 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, it's a really big contributor to your life chances.

00:13:35 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes. And I think at the moment, many parents are focused only on the educational outcomes –  and they might see the high performing school as the only school that can be good for their children because of education – and I think very few parents think about the wider opportunities that a school might bring – and that might be having more contact with people from different backgrounds, which can affect these broader outcomes as well.

00:13:56 Prof. Simon Burgess

Do you think parents would be able to tell which schools could provide those other things? Because their academic performance – we measure and provide it.

00:14:05 Dr Ellen Greaves

No, I don't think it's well measured and it's still emerging evidence in the literature. So that's probably one reason why it's not something that parents are more aware about. 

And also, don't forget that we've had 30 years of governments telling parents: ‘look at the test scores’, ‘look at the offset ratings’, ‘look at the test scores’. So, I think parents these days are very used to looking at league tables and results and not maybe so much thinking about the other outcomes.

00:14:29 Prof. Simon Burgess

Yeah, but you're right – I mean – parents care a lot about those other outcomes as well. They want their child to grow up – you know – with those kinds of things available to them. So yeah – I mean increasingly they may be choosing schools on that basis too.

00:14:42 Dr Ellen Greaves

So why do you think schools matter so much?

00:14:44 Prof. Simon Burgess

I think schools matter and I think schools differ. 

So, it's quite clear from the evidence that some schools are highly effective and do a great job for their pupils.

00:14:54 Dr Ellen Greaves

How do you define ‘effectiveness’?

00:14:56 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, in this in this sense, I'm using effectiveness in a in a precise but very narrow way. So, simply in terms of the contribution of that school to a child's academic growth – the improvement in their ability and skills and knowledge, as reflected in as reflected in test scores – I guess principally GCSEs. 

00:15:17 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, it's absolutely only part of what schools do and – as we were talking about a few minutes ago – schools contribute much more broadly to a child's growing up. 

00:15:28 Prof. Simon Burgess

So yes, so that's what that's what I mean by effectiveness. And I think schools differ considerably in their degree of effectiveness in that sense. If your child goes to a highly effective school, they're – on average – likely to get much better qualifications. Go to a less effective school – the same child might well get slightly less good qualifications. 

00:15:50 Prof. Simon Burgess

So obviously the family background that the child comes from is incredibly important. We're not at all saying – not remotely saying – that school is all that matters. But school does matter.

And then with your qualifications, this affects – as you were saying Ellen – this affects your earnings and your chance of going to university, your chance of getting a nice, interesting, pleasant job. Your chance of – yeah, all of your life chances.

00:16:16 Prof. Simon Burgess

You and I and our colleagues on this project are experts on school admissions, and we found a lot of what you found very, very difficult to get our heads around. So, what on Earth can it be like for parents to try and choose a school?

00:16:28 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes, I think it's a very complicated process for many parents, partly because there is such diversity across England – there’s not one standard way of doing things, and so it's hard to compare. If you come from one area – you might know one thing, but a different area – you might know something else.

There's also quite a lot of misunderstanding about the school allocation mechanism itself.

00:16:49 Dr Ellen Greaves

When parents actually submit their choices, they have the incentive to rank them in order of their preferences and use their full number of choices – be it 3 or 5, or 4, 5 or 6 – depending on where you live in England. But many parents have the misunderstanding that they have more chance of being admitted if they have – if they rank only one school.

So that's a general point – that there are still some common misunderstandings in England. Or that you have priority in your first choice, which is not the case anymore in England.

00:17:19 Dr Ellen Greaves

Coming on to our research – we found that many local authorities don't collect the information for all schools in their local authority. They're not required to. They're only required to collect and publish the information for schools that they control. But that makes it a very difficult process for parents in that local authority – trying to pull information from different sources to compare all school, for example, the community schools and the academies and free schools in their area. 

00:17:48 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, we would suggest to local authorities that – although they're not required to collect this information for all schools – it would really help parents to have a central source of information.

00:17:58 Dr Ellen Greaves

There were also cases where parents would find it impossible to know whether they had priority at a certain school. 

So, for example, there are cases where finding out the catchment area – the predefined area which gives you priority at the school – in some cases that was hard to find, it was a case of emailing or visiting the school. In some cases, it was impossible to find – the school could not provide it. Or the admissions criteria said they had a catchment area, but the school said actually: ‘we don't’.

00:18:28 Dr Ellen Greaves

So there are a minority of cases where parents would find it incredibly hard to know, and it may rely on word of mouth that – you know – your street is in this catchment area or not. 

So, there are big barriers to parents in England. Firstly, just the complexity and diversity of the system and secondly, the lack of information in some areas.

00:18:50 Prof. Simon Burgess

Didn't you come across a hand drawn map at one stage for one school?

00:18:53 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes, yes. A hand drawn map from the ‘80s it looked like!

00:18:57 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, some of the schools are basically saying we have catchment areas but they're secret and we're not telling you where they are?

00:19:01 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yeah. A minority, a minority.

00:19:03 Prof. Simon Burgess

Yeah, for sure, for sure. 

So I mean – it just feels like that's such an easy policy for a government or a local authority to undertake really – centralise all the information, make schools do this – because parents get really stressed about this and they want to do the right thing for their kid, and they're doing their best, but the information is just not there.

00:19:25 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes, absolutely. 

And local authorities really vary. So, in some local authorities they will have an interactive map where you can zoom in and find your address and look at the catchment areas – maybe multiple catchment areas that your address is in. And in other cases – contrast that with the hand drawn map example. 

So yeah, there's huge variation in the experience of parents making their school choices. 

00:19:48 Dr Ellen Greaves

So why should parents care about whether they are in or not?

So, the admission system in England – once a parent submits their school choices, if they don't get into their first, there's no penalty at the second. So really, parents don't have to think extremely carefully about their admissions chances in in a very strategic way. 

00:20:11 Dr Ellen Greaves

On the other hand, in some areas of the country parents only have 3 choices. So, if they are – kind of – ambitious and make school choices which are unlikely to be successful, then they may be unallocated to any of their preferred choices and end up in a school they haven't listed which has some spare seats – an unpopular school.

00:20:32 Dr Ellen Greaves

So, although the admissions system doesn't build in incentives to choose a school you can definitely get into, there is – by this constrained list of 3, 4, 5 or 6 choices – it does build in some element that parents have to think carefully about where they can feasibly get in.

00:20:51 Prof. Simon Burgess

So, what challenges do you do you feel that we've felt in this project so far, Ellen?

00:20:55 Dr Ellen Greaves

Where shall we start?!

So, it has been a very challenging project. First of all – the data collection of school admissions priorities. 

We were very fortunate to have an excellent research assistant, but she did have to hand code school admissions criteria. Because schools and local authorities record things in different ways – so clever techniques like web scraping weren't possible for that task. 

00:21:20 Dr Ellen Greaves

Once that hurdle was over – which took around a year – we had a complicated task of geocoding school catchment areas. Again, some from hand drawn maps and some from digital sites, so actually that – having the amazing data we have now was a lot of hard work to code.

00:21:41 Dr Ellen Greaves

Even the detail on which feeder schools give you priority – collecting information on school feeders, linking school names to school codes in our analysis. 

And then that that's the kind of practical data side. But in terms of methodology, perhaps you can talk about the local education markets, other techniques that we're learning about?

00:22:02 Prof. Simon Burgess

Yeah. And even before the data analysis, our first funding application was turned down. So that delayed us about a year. 

So yeah, there've been a number of – sort of – common academic challenges in terms of funding, in terms of data collection.

Yeah, and now we're trying to define local education markets with different – sort of whizzy new algorithms. And that's proving slow and complex work. 

So yeah, plenty of challenges. 

00:22:31 Prof. Simon Burgess

This feels like the bit in the David Attenborough movie – at the end where you say – you know – how did the team actually do, when they were struggling through the equatorial forest to meet the gorillas?! 

So, we didn't quite have that! But funding and data will have to do for boring old economics!

00:22:48 Dr Ellen Greaves

Yes!