The impact of choice on educational outcomes: sorting by ability across English secondary schools Simon Burgess, Brendon McConnell, Carol Propper and Deborah Wilson CMPO, University of Bristol 12 Priory Road Bristol BS8 1TN UK +44 117 954 6943 Simon.Burgess@bristol.ac.uk Paper prepared for the CESifo-Harvard University/PEPG Conference: Schooling and Human Capital Formation in the Global Economy: Revisiting the Equity-Efficiency Quandary; Munich, September 2004. Preliminary and incomplete. Please do not cite without permission. Abstract This paper focuses on one of the outcomes arising from England’s choice based education system; the extent to which different types of pupils are sorted across schools. Pupil sorting will impact on attainment outcomes if peer group effects operate within schools. We consider three dimensions across which sorting may occur: ethnicity, income, and, for the first time using UK data, ability. We use a very large administrative dataset which contains linked histories of test scores for every pupil in England, as well as pupil level markers for ethnicity and low household income, and their home postcode (zip code). This, coupled with school postcode, enables us to match pupils to both their actual and their nearest school. We first establish that choice is both feasible for and exercised by the majority of pupils in England. We then characterise and describe ability sorting and relate it to feasibility of choice. We compare sorting across schools with sorting across neighbourhoods along the three dimensions, and then investigate the correlates of ability sorting at a local level. We establish that post-residential school choice is an important component of the overall schooling decision. We find a strong correlation between ability sorting and the feasibility of choice, and show that there is a difference in the school- neighbourhood sorting relationship between areas that operate under different student- to-school assignment rules. 1