Equal Opportunities Or Loaded Dice? the 2007 Admissions Code Afterthe Brighton and Hove

Equal opportunities or loaded dice? The 2007 Admissions Code after the Brighton and Hove adjudication

In February 2007 the British Government’s Department for Education and Schools, latterly the Department for Children, Schools and Families, England, brought into law a new Code of Practice for school admissions. This Code of Practice was seen as central to the Labour Government’s agenda of ensuring ‘fair access’ to schools for all children within the compulsory phases of education. Many of the existing criteria for admissions arrangements such as the distance-to-school measure and the use of catchment areas remained acceptable within the new code. However, for the first time in the English education system, random allocation ballots or “lotteries” as they have become more widely known were also sanctioned as a potentially ‘fair’ means of deciding school places. The problematic concept of ‘fair access’ was enshrined within the new code’s statutory legislation, with Alan Johnson, the then Secretary of State for Education writing that the advent of the new code would ensure that admissions procedures ‘operate in a fair way that promotes social equity and community cohesion’ (DfES, 2007, P.7).

The first Local Authority to base a reform of its secondary admissions procedures on the new Code of Practice was Brighton and Hove, where a new system was approved just as the new Code came into force. The Authority had faced severe and mounting pressure from groups of parents within the City over ‘fair access’ to popular secondary schools. The new legislation seemed to offer a way out and the Authority resolved to replace distance-to-school with a catchment-plus-lotteries system. Five schools would have their own catchments, while four would be placed into two ‘dual catchments’. The first function of lotteries would be to handle oversubscription within each of the dual catchments, aiming to share out places at the more popular of the two catchment schools in a fair manner. Lotteries would also be used to ration places at catchment level in the event of catchment oversubscription. The Authority’s proposals proved very controversial, and were approved only after Objections to them had been rejected by the Schools Adjudicator.

Study of the Schools Adjudicator’s judgement in the Brighton and Hove case sheds important light on the question of whether the 2007 Admissions Code, its rhetoric aside, can be expected to deliver fairer access to secondary schools. That this issue matters is demonstrated by the latest report from the Sutton Trust (2007a), which gives evidence of widening achievement gaps between different socio-economic groups.

In #18 the Adjudicator writes: ‘I have noted the requirement of the Code (in paragraph 1.67) that admission arrangements must not ‘disadvantage, either directly or indirectly, a child from a particular social or racial group . . .’. However, it would be impossible to devise any admission arrangements of any kind, particularly those with a geographical factor in them (including proximity to schools), that did not in the wider sense disadvantage some children; and, as all children belong to some social group, inevitably they will disadvantage some children who belong to specific social groups. [..] So I understand this requirement of the Code to mean that no such children shall be disadvantaged by reason of their belonging to particular social or racial groups.’ [emphasis added] This interpretation defines disadvantage ex post at the level of the individual child and would imply, for instance, that admissions arrangements within an authority which resulted in a very popular school having 10% of BME children and a very unpopular school having 90% BME could only be contested under #1.67 if the BME children who did not get into the popular school had been denied access by reason of their racial group, i.e. directly. This interpretation would accordingly appear to make the prohibition of indirect disadvantage in #1.67 redundant.

An interpretation more in line with government policy on equal opportunity would instead define disadvantage ex ante in terms of the chance of a child from a particular social or racial group gaining a place at any given school. That would require admissions arrangements to ensure, in the above example, that BME and non-BME children who aspired to places at the popular school had roughly equal chances, on average, of gaining admission. Since the requirement would only have to be met on average, discrimination within each racial group, e.g. by the use of racially-balanced catchment areas, would be permissible.

Objectors to the new system based their case partly on a demonstration that the two main concentrations of educationally-deprived children in Brighton and Hove had been placed into catchments which excluded them from access to the most popular schools in the City. The Adjudicator was able to use his narrow interpretation of #1.67 to sidestep this evidence of social segregation.

With respect to this key paragraph in the Code, the Government not only needs to clarify urgently how it is to be interpreted, but also what is meant by a ‘social group’ – i.e., if it is to be defined by disadvantage, which measure or measures of disadvantage should be used. The Council in Brighton and Hove used the blunt tool of percentage in receipt of Free School Meals (FSM), rejecting the more sensitive and accurate Education, Skills and Training domain of the Index of Multiple Deprivation, readily available at a highly disaggregated level (i.e. by Super Output Area). The Adjudicator commented only that ‘I do not believe that I am called upon to reconcile these two differing approaches.’

Much has been made of the introduction of lotteries in Brighton and Hove, but in truth these are a sideshow. The two large concentrations of educationally-deprived children have been placed in single-school catchments where the lottery is intended to act only as a fail-safe mechanism in the event of catchment oversubscription. It is true that lotteries in the two ‘dual’ catchments are likely to promote within-catchment balanced intakes for the pair of schools in each case, but this of course cannot touch the far more severe inequalities that have been created by the drawing of the catchment map itself (projected 2009 FSM intake percentages by catchment ranging from 10% to 32%). One can only wonder what reception the Government’s new Choice Advisers will receive as they bring the glad tidings to Brighton’s housing estates of enhanced help with travel costs for deprived children wishing to access high-performing but distant schools. ‘One year too late’ is the politest response that we can envisage.

We would urge the Government to revise and clarify the Code to deal with the difficulties that the Brighton case has brought into such sharp focus. If, for example, ‘social group’ were to be defined in terms of ability, and disadvantage were defined ex ante as described above, admissions authorities might be led in the direction of ability banding, favoured in the Code and powerfully advocated in a recent report from the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR). This could lead to a significant decrease in levels of social segregation whilst also giving all schools a fairer chance of improving their performance.

The IPPR report says, correctly, that a catchment and random allocation system might be expected to produce similar benefits to ability banding – although the catchments would have to be drawn to be socially-balanced, as is not the case in the new system in Brighton and Hove. A version of such a system was implemented some years ago in New Zealand, but recent research has shown that, while this did succeed in lowering social segregation at first, the improvement was only temporary (Lauder et al 1999, Fiske and Ladd 2000, Gorard and Fitz, 2006). The Sutton Trust has recently given evidence of the high degree of social segregation in our school system and states with regards to ballots that ‘the real debate in many senses should concern how fair the other criteria (such as catchment areas or ability banding) are to begin with – not the lottery process itself’ (The Sutton Trust, 2007b, P.6). With this in mind it is clear that there is some work to be done on ‘what counts as evidence’ (Gorard and Fitz, 2006) and that we should not pin our hopes for a reduction in social segregation on a game of chance.

References

Fiske, E. & Ladd, H. (2000) When schools compete: a cautionary tale, Washington: DC, Brookings Institution Press.

Gorard, S. & Fitz, J. (2006) What counts as evidence in the school choice debate? British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 32, No.6, P.797-816

DfES (2007) School Admissions Code, available from: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/sacode/ Accessed January 2008

Lauder, H., Hughes, D. Watson, S. et al. (1999) Trading in futures: why markets in education don’t work, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Lindley, R (2007) Schools Adjudicator’s determination on objections to Brighton and Hove City Council’s School Admissions, Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA), available from: http://www.schoolsadjudicator.gov.uk/decision.cfm Accessed December 2007

The Sutton Trust, (2007a) Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in the UK available from: http://www.suttontrust.com/annualreports.asp Accessed December 2007.

The Sutton Trust, (2007b) Ballots in School Admissions, available from: http://www.suttontrust.com/annualreports.asp Accessed December 2007.

Tough, S. & Brooks, R. (2007), School Admissions: Fair choice for parents and pupils, Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), available from: http://www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=546 Accessed December 2007

Robert Eastwood Senior Lecturer in Economics University of Sussex

Keith Turvey Senior Lecturer in Education University of Brighton