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SEGREGATED SCHOOLS

Segregated schools are very important topic to debate. Expansion of choice has become a central theme of recent educational policy debates in internationally and globally. Some argue that freedom of choice ensures that pupils and schools are efficiently matched for pupils encourages schools to adopt more efficient teaching methods. Others point to the possibly adverse consequences of a more ‘segregated’ school system, in which pupils are less likely to mix with children unlike themselves in terms of background and ability. According to these arguments, more choice is bad – either because segregation seems to imply inequality or is inherently socially undesirable; or because it is claimed that a segregated school system is educationally inefficient. Setting aside broad and subjective arguments over the desirability of ethnic and social mixing, the most compelling cause for concern is that the separation of pupils into academically advantaged and disadvantaged groups may work to exacerbate inequalities in educational outcomes without producing any overall benefits. This can occur if children are influenced by the achievements and behavior of their schoolmates – so-called ‘peer group’ effects – or simply because disadvantaged pupils place greater pressure on teaching resources and so harm the chances of others in their classroom or school.

These issues have become highly relevant in the light of policies that seek to expand parental choice. Our research has sought some answers to the key questions: what is the extent of educational segregation? Are the patterns changing? Are secondary school pupils educationally segregated? And what contribution does this make to educational inequality? Most of the debate about school segregation (and hence much previous research) has been concerned with demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Relatively little attention has been paid to the important issue of segregation that is explicitly along lines of educational advantage and disadvantage –presumably the key concern to those worried about inequality in education.

For parents too, the real consideration seems to be the stratification along lines of pupil ‘ability’ or capacity to achieve. In the first part of our research, we look explicitly at the extent to which high achieving and low-achieving pupils are separated into and educated in different secondary schools – and how this changed between 1995 and 2003. We do this by examining differences in the composition of secondary state schools in terms of the academic achievements of pupils at the time they start school. Plotting each school’s average pupil ranking against its own ranking in the distribution of schools provides a fairly complete visual description of the way in which pupils with different prior achievements are segregated into different secondary schools. If there were very little segregation, then there would be very little difference between the achievements of the average pupil as we move from the worst to the best schools, and the plot would tend towards the horizontal. The analysis is based on pupils’ results in their maths, science and English. Previous research has typically used various segregation or inequality indices – single numbers that summaries the level of inequality at a particular point in time –but we adopt a more graphical approach. For each secondary school, we can calculate the position in that ranking of the average pupil, a score that summaries the average intake ability in each school. Then, with these average school scores, we can rank schools in the same way.