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Disadvantaged children are suffering “geographic exclusion” from England’s best state schools because they cannot afford to live near those with the best exam results, according to new research published by the University of Bristol.
The research found that very few state secondary schools give priority to pupils who qualify for free school meals, despite the government’s admissions rules being redesigned more than eight years ago allowing them to do so.
Ellen Greaves, one of the authors, said: “As schools achieving the strongest outcomes for pupils are more likely to be oversubscribed, they have the power to devise entry systems to choose who attends.
“Picking pupils according to where they live can mean students from the poorest families are assigned to the least effective schools. Top-performing schools get to indirectly select pupils from affluent households in the vicinity, effectively freezing out those less fortunate and hindering social mobility.”
More than 800,000 families across England will on Wednesday discover if their child has received a school place at their first-preference school, as local authorities inform them of the results of this year’s applications for year 7 entry.
For those denied a place at their first choice, the most common reason will be proximity, meaning that children who live closer to the school have also applied.
The team from Bristol found that children from disadvantaged families struggled more to gain a place at popular schools with high exam results and good inspection grades.
The research found that only 42 of more than 3,000 comprehensive schools and academies in England had changed their admission codes to ensure that children receiving free school meals were offered places ahead of those who lived near a school.
Instead, more than 80% of secondary schools use catchment areas or proximity to the school gates as the main way of deciding who gets a place when a school is oversubscribed.
Ruth Maisey, programme head of education at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “Prioritising local pupils reinforces geographic inequalities by excluding those who can’t afford to live close to the top-performing schools.
“We hope this research encourages more schools to think creatively about using their admissions criteria to promote opportunity and fairer access.”
The revisions to the school admissions code in 2014 allowed schools to place eligibility for free school meals high on their list of “tie-breaker” criteria, giving them precedence over other criteria.
But in recent years many schools have converted to academies, giving them more leeway over admissions priorities, rather than them being decided by local authorities. The result has been “a raft of different, highly complicated processes which, in some cases, are not only hard for parents to understand but also serve to perpetuate social inequalities and division”, according to the Bristol academics.
Simon Burgess, the lead author and a professor of economics at Bristol, said: “Disadvantaged and advantaged families tend to be concentrated geographically, so school catchment areas are bound to have a disproportionate number of either fairly affluent families or disadvantaged families.”
Burgess said he was surprised at how few schools had taken advantage of the admissions code changes, given that schools get substantial financial incentives from the government to enrol students eligible for free school meals.
While using geography had its advantages in fostering communities and ensuring that pupils lived close to their school friends, Burgess said: “We have a trade-off between the value society puts on community and the value society puts on social mobility, giving kids from poor families the chance to go to an effective schools.
“But at the moment we’re all the way over on one side of the scale, and we’re not doing much for social mobility except at a handful of schools.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “If the government is serious about improving social mobility, they must look at school admissions as a priority and make strides to support all schools to provide a quality education, through funding and teacher recruitment, in order to improve fairness and access for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
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