RESEARCH AND INFORMATION ON STATE EDUCATION March 2015 Key points School admissions: lessons from the evidence John Coldron Sheffeld Institute of Education, Sheffeld Hallam University Concerns shaping policy and research Admission policies to schools over the past two decades have been designed to serve a variety of purposes and re- search into those policies has sought answers to a variety of questions. There is an enduring concern about the fair- ness of admissions. It is the case that higher performing schools are attended more often by children from richer families while poorer chil- dren are more likely to attend a school that is performing less well. One interpretation of this is that the admission system is not ensuring that each parent has an equal opportunity to gain access to the best schools, which in turn leads to their lower attainment and restricted social mobility (see Forewords by Sir Peter Lampl in Cribb et al, 2013). Policy, regulation and campaigning have therefore been aimed at helping poorer parents to gain better access. Research has sought to monitor how far the intakes of schools differ and whether some types of schools are more socially segregated than others, and to identify causes. A concern for fairness overlaps with a con- cern to ensure the effciency of procedures such that the admission system optimally matches parents’ preferences with places available and better ensures equality of oppor- tunity for parents to gain their most preferred school. The greater diversity and opportunity to choose has made the process of admissions more complex for parents and administrators and in the early years of implementation there was considerable ineffciency (Audit Commis- sion, 1996) with the process being complex and unpredictable for parents. Research has sought to address the issue of design, moni- tor the proportion of parents gaining their pre- ferred school and gauge the level of parental satisfaction. Another concern has been with the effective- ness of the admissions system in facilitating policy aims. Successive governments have been committed to the introduction of market relations between schools and parents as a way of improving the education system. One purpose of the regulation and legislation on ad- missions has therefore been to establish and maintain effective market relations. It has, for example, reduced the power of local authori- ties (LAs) in relation to education in their local area, required schools to provide adequate in- formation about their performance and admis- sion arrangements, allowed different providers of schools, allowed popular schools to expand and threatened failing schools with closure. Research has attempted to fnd how far opti- mum market conditions exist, what criteria par- ents use and whether system performance has been affected. A critical strand of this research has looked at unintended effects. Another focus of concern is the danger to the stability and cohesiveness of communities when children from different religious or cultur- al backgrounds are educated separately. Faith schools are a historical feature of the English system where the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England have provided schools for members of their religious communities and there have been a very small number of Jewish schools (Allen and West, 2009). There have recently been added a small proportion of schools for other faiths. In addition, because immigrants from the same part of the world tend to cluster for a period in the same areas of cities, non-faith schools can have a large pro- portion of children from a particular religious community. The concern is that this exacer- bates tensions between different social groups and fuels social unrest. The regulation of admissions In 1998, the new Labour government passed the School Standards and Framework Act, es- tablishing a new legal framework for school ad- missions, which, amended and strengthened by subsequent acts, remains the foundation of current offcial practices. The Secretary of State is required to issue codes of practice on admission arrangements, the latest of which came into force in December 2014. The evolving codes have been powerful instruments for governing admissions prac- tices. Admission authorities (AAs) (including academy trusts) and LAs must comply with (not just have regard to) the codes. The Offce of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) makes binding adjudications on objections, receives reports from LAs and occasionally conducts research on relevant topics. England now has one of the most highly regulated admission systems (for comparison see the Matching in Practice in Europe web- site, www.matching-in-practice.eu/). In addition • Admission policy serves a variety of purposes and therefore research has sought answers to various questions – about fairness, effciency, policy aims and segregation. • Strong regulation needs to continue. • Parents do not choose on the basis of educational attainment alone – competition for parental custom on academic criteria does not act as an effective driver of system improve- ment. • Evidence from different perspectives suggests that the aim of policy should be to achieve more balanced intakes to schools. • There is increasing disruption at ground level of the regulatory regime due to the reduction in the role of LAs and an increase in the number of own admission authority schools. • Policy makers and campaigners should resist simplistic conclusions that the unfairness of admissions is a market dysfunction that can be tweaked, or is the result of a lack of access to “good” schools, or middle class monopolisation of high perform- ing institutions, and make policy in full acknowledgement of the complex dynamics of parental choice, social solidarity and schools’ responses to accountability; school segregation is a symptom of inequality rather than its cause. • How children get allocated to schools is an aspect of the role that schooling plays in our society refect- ing moral and political visions of how education contributes to achieving an ordered, prosperous and cohesive society.