Catchment areas undermine hopes for Brighton lottery, study finds

03 September 2010

Brighton and Hove's controversial school admissions lottery system has failed in one of its key aims – to give deprived children equal access to better performing schools, a study by academics from the Institute of Education, London and the University of Bristol finds. The system has resulted in significant winners and losers – but has not markedly reduced social segregation, it says.

A paper presented at the British Educational Research Association conference today (Friday) shows that the two-year-old reform does not give equal chances to all pupils because catchment areas are still the main determinants of access to particular schools.

The new catchment areas are drawn in such a way that families in the poorest neighbourhoods still have little chance of getting into the most popular schools in the city centre.

"The main lesson of our analysis is that the introduction of a lottery on its own is not enough to equalise access to the high-performing popular schools," say Rebecca Allen of the Institute of Education, London, and Simon Burgess and Leigh McKenna of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO), University of Bristol. "The drawing of the catchment area boundaries is central to the outcome of the reform."

Although Allen, Burgess and McKenna found that, if anything, socio-economic segregation increased slightly, "we do see a significant change in the relationship between the poverty of a student's neighbourhood and the academic quality of the school attended by that student." In particular, some students from wealthier neighbourhoods were now attending less academically successful secondaries than they might have expected to previously. "These are the primary group losing out from the reform, balanced by a more diffuse group of winners who gained access to the higher performing schools."

The Brighton & Hove lottery system, introduced in 2007, was an attempt to tackle concerns about social segregation in education. By abandoning proximity as a tie-breaker in school admissions, so-called "selection by mortgage" would, in theory, come to an end, and opportunities for poorer children would be enhanced.

"It will be several more years before the long-run impact of the school admissions reforms in Brighton and Hove become apparent because we do expect families to relocate and house prices to adjust in response to the re-drawing of the catchment boundaries," the authors say.

"Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the reforms are likely to substantially lower social segregation across schools even in the long-run in this city where differences in the quality of housing stock across areas are deeply entrenched and the boundaries of the new catchment areas mean that families living in the most deprived neighbourhoods have little chance of accessing the most popular schools in the centre of the city."

Under the system used by the local authority, six distinct catchment areas were drawn up. Instead of giving preference to children living closest to a school, allocations within catchments were random. Parents were free to apply to schools outside their catchment area, but if the school was already oversubscribed they were not entered into the lottery.

Ends

Editors' notes
1. For more information or to speak to the authors contact Diane Hofkins 020 7911 5423, d.hofkins@ioe.ac.uk
2. The paper, The early impact of Brighton and Hove's school admission reforms by Rebecca Allen, Institute of Education; Simon Burgess, CMPO, University of Bristol, and Leigh McKenna, CMPO, University of Bristol, can be downloaded from http://www.bris.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2010/wp244.pdf from Friday 3 September.
3. The IOE The Institute of Education is a college of the University of London that specialises in education and related areas of social science and professional practice. In the most recent Research Assessment Exercise two-thirds of the publications that the IOE submitted were judged to be internationally significant and over a third were judged to be "world leading". The Institute was recognised by Ofsted in 2010 for its "high quality" initial teacher training programmes that inspire its students "to want to be outstanding teachers". The IOE is a member of the 1994 group, which brings together nineteen internationally renowned, research-intensive universities.
4. BERA
The annual conference of the British Educational Research Association is being held at the University of Warwick from Wednesday, September 1 to Saturday, September 4. More than 500 research papers will be presented during the course of the conference. The conference programme can be accessed via the BERA website: http://www.beraconference.co.uk
5.CMPO
The Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO) is a leading research centre based at the University of Bristol, combining expertise in economics, geography and law. The Centre's objective is to study the intersection between the public and private sectors of the economy, and in particular to understand the right way to organise and deliver public services. The Centre aims to develop research, contribute to the public debate and inform policy-making. CMPO started its second five years as an ESRC Research Centre in October 2009. The Centre was established in 1998 and became an ESRC-funded Research Centre in 2004.