Stephen Gorard, John Fitz, Chris Taylor and Patrick White
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University
01222-875113
email: gorard@cardiff.ac.uk

Main Conference

Individual paper

School allocation, school choice, social segregation

Even within an apparently national system of allocating secondary school places, such as that envisaged in the 1988 Education Reform Act and subsequent legislation, there is considerable local and regional variety in the achieved results. Some of this variation is due to differences in the school mix, but much is also due to both the deliberate and presumably unintended consequences of local arrangements. These arrangements include the information given to families, the relationship between schools and the LEA, and, above all, the criteria used to allocate contested places.

This paper reports on the results from the first year of a detailed study of the local procedures for allocating school places in 22 authorities in England and Wales (as part of ESRC grant R000238031). Through an examination of the implications of national leglislation, local directives and publications, and interviews with representatives from schools and LEAs, the study attempts a fuller explanation of their impact on the social composition of schools (and hence presumably on raw-score outcome measures).