School choice, admissions and equity

At the core of every education system is a system for assigning pupils to schools. This might be simply by residence - you go to your local school. Or it might be based on an exam score - like the school tracking systems in a number of European countries and how the grammar school used to operate in England. Or it might be based on parental choice of school, like the system we have now in most of England.

How this assignment system works has strong implications for the average level of attainment, for inequality in attainment, and specifically for how well children from deprived communities do. Figuring out these implications is what my research here is all about.

Scientific Papers

These links are to the Discussion Paper versions of the papers; these are freely available to everyone. Many of the papers are also published in scientific journals but those are often restricted access.

• Understanding Parental Choices of Secondary School in England Using National Administrative Data (2017)
• Human Capital and Education: The State of the Art in the Economics of Education (2015) (IZA DP)
• Selective schooling systems increase inequality  (2014)
• The early impact of Brighton and Hove’s school admission reforms (2010)
• Choosing secondary school by moving house: school quality and the formation of neighbourhoods (201)
• 'Parental choice of primary school in England: what ‘type’ of school do parents choose?' (2009)
• 'What Parents Want: School preferences and school choice' (2009)
• 'Using Boundary Changes to Estimate the Impact of School Competition on Test Scores' (2006)
• The Impact of School Choice on Sorting by Ability and Socio-economic Factors in English Secondary Education. With Brendon McConnell, Carol Propper and Deborah Wilson. in (L. Woessmann and P. Peterson (eds) Schools and the Equal Opportunity Problem. MIT Press, Cambridge. (2006) 
• 'School Assignment, School Choice and Social Mobility' (2006)
• 'School Choice in England: Background Facts' (2006)
• 'Sorting and Choice in English Secondary Schools' (2004)

Policy writing

These links are to short (-ish) blog posts written to highlight interesting findings or to comment on education policy.

• School Places: A Fair Choice (February 2020)
• School choice and school admissions
• Interpreting the numbers of school admissions – is the first preference offers rate too high?
• How to cut 'postcode inequality' in schools
• Schools and Inequality, Part 253
• Education Policy in the Election 3: Autonomy, Regulation and Academy Chains
• Why are pupils from disadvantaged families more often found studying in poorly performing schools?
• Grammar school systems increase inequality
• Profits in schools – response
• Should we have profit-making schools?
• “All we want is a good local school”
• Revising the Draft School Admissions Code
• Using Lotteries in School Admissions