Tackling disadvantage in school admissions

It’s been 10 years since the changes to the Admissions Code in 2014 allowed schools to make allocating places fairer.

Sally Weale, Education correspondent for The Guardian, has written an article this week that shines a light on the issue of social mobility and school admissions, and research carried out by Kevin Latham for the Sutton Trust. The article plays on the debate as to how selective education contributes to social mobility compared to the universal offer of non-selective schools.

Read the Some comprehensive schools 'more socially selective than grammars' article here

Working in a grammar school, one of the biggest challenges we face in getting the proportion of our students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds into the double figures is ensuring that they are able to meet the academic standard. We already see a gap in achievement at Key Stage 2 and our Outreach and Widening Access programmes try to address this. We give priority to Pupil Premium students who meet the academic threshold in accordance to the Admissions Code changes but there are always calls for Pupil Premium students being given a different admissions criteria. The spotlight has often been on what grammar schools are doing to help or hinder the to shift in balance.

I'm looking forward to drilling down into the data. (The summary report is only 13 pages.) Until then I've been interested in The Guardian article, which focuses on the admissions data for the top 500 comprehensive schools in England. When ranked by Progress 8, the proportion of disadvantaged students is 17.1% compared the average of 22% for all comprehensive schools. However, when ranking schools on exam grades, this is even lower at 13.3% which, again, highlights the impact of Key Stage 2 performance.

In response to the report, the Headteachers' unions have tried to temper the political fallout by stating that it's about ensuring that ALL schools are given the support, resources and funding to ensure they can provide all students with a high quality education. I agree with this. This is the ideal and it a young person's prospects shouldn't be determined by the school they attend. Yet this is the current situation that we find ourselves in. This report demonstrates that there is still a lot to be done to ensure that students from disadvantaged background have priority and access to the top schools (there will always be 'top schools'), whatever they are.

One of the issues that needs to be considered when looking at social mobility and the impact of schools' admissions criteria on disadvantage is catchment. The school catchment is often held up as a virtuous principle of service to the local community. Catchments do make sense in ensuring that young people don't need to travel distances at the beginning and end of the school day and they help to reduce travel costs for families. However, any parent who has found themselves in the 'wrong catchment' can tell you that social selection is inevitable consequence of the current admissions process.

The Guardian's Education Editor, Richard Adams, highlighted the issue of 'geographic exclusion' back in March 2023. He refers to research carried out by the School of Economics at the University of Bristol on school admissions and 'the rules schools use to choose who to admit'. The research (111 pages and may take a bit more time to drill down on the detail) found that, just as the latest research does, there has been little change in the last 10 years in giving priority to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It claims that only 42 schools out of over 3000 schools in England have made significant changes to offer more places. In fact, it goes further to suggest that, as 80% of schools use catchment as the main deciding factor in oversubscription, some schools are enjoying the ability to draw from 'affluent households in the vicinity'.

Read the England's poorer pupils face 'geographic exclusion' from top state schools article here

I recall a story when I worked in a high performing comprehensive school that had just welcomed an Ofsted inspection not long after our best ever set of exam results. As part of a casual conversation in the morning when we were getting a coffee in the staff room, they commented on the great news on our Ofsted judgement and the 'Outstanding' outcome. I was thinking about it as a vindication for all the hard work that had been put in by staff and students. I wasn't prepared for the shift in the conversation when they said "It really helps with house prices. You'd be surprised how much this helps with the value of the houses around here." Now that I have had children go through the secondary school system and chose to send my children to the local comprehensive school, I've become more aware of the impact of catchment. With another child just starting primary school and friends with children just starting Key Stage 2, I now find myself at social functions where the discussion is catchment; parents informing friends that they might need to move and discussing the game of renting out their own property to be able to rent a property in the catchment of the 'best school' in the area. It's a certain type of parent who is best equipped to play this game and they are not the disadvantaged families that the admissions code is trying to help.

#WideningAccess #Admissions #Selection #SocialMobility