Student composition and school type in England

Pupils with different background characteristics are not evenly spread across schools in England. Whilst residential location (and the residential clustering of groups from different social and ethnic backgrounds) has been highlighted as a significant factor influencing this, researchers have also found higher levels of sorting in schools than can be explained by neighbourhood composition alone (Johnston et al. 2006). This suggests that there must be other factors at work too. In this chapter I draw attention to the association between school type and student compositions. The existence of selective schools, faith schools and some types of autonomous schools (as opposed to Local Authority maintained comprehensive schools) has been found to be associated with higher levels of school stratification on a local level (Gorard, 2015).

Before considering diversity within the wider state system, it is important to acknowledge the well-established private and selective sector that exists in England. The private/independent sector currently educates around seven percent of all pupils (The Economist, 2015) and, unsurprisingly, these pupils are much more likely to be from a higher socioeconomic background due to fees and other costs associated with attendance. Academically-selective grammar schools – which serve around four percent of Year 7 pupils - also tend to cater for more advantaged pupils, both in terms of prior ability and affluence (Burgess et al., 2014a). While the schools are only overtly selective by ability, the costs associated with additional tuition in order to pass the entrance exam and transport mean that they also have the potential to sort by socioeconomic status too (Cribb et al., 2013).

The debates surrounding the intakes, equity and effectiveness of private and selective schooling persist. But it is to intakes within different types of state-maintained schools that I now turn. Imbalanced intakes across schools in England are not a new phenomenon, existing long before the extension of open enrolment policies in the 1988 ERA (Gorard et al., 2003). The introduction of increased autonomy and diversity within the system has, however, been associated with increasing or reinforcing differences between schools and their intakes. The

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establishment of grant-maintained schools in 1988 gave schools the opportunity to ‘opt out’ of LA control, and were promoted as an important part of the developing choice and competition discourses. Although studies found little evidence that the schools were offering anything that new or different to their community school counterparts, their ‘opt out’ status did seem to reinforce the notion of ‘difference’ (Power et al., 1994), something which some believe contributed to the advantaged intakes that they had (Benn and Chitty, 1996).

The specialist schools initiative was another policy aimed at encouraging distinctiveness and diversity within the system (DfEE, 2001). But evidence suggested that having a specialism allowed the schools to more easily overtly and covertly ‘select in’ and ‘select out’ certain pupils. This ‘cream-skimming’ (Epple and Romano (1998; West et al., 2006), it was argued, led to specialist schools having disproportionately advantaged intakes (Gorard and Taylor, 2001), encouraging what Exley (2009) describes as ‘positional advantage’ within the schools market and potentially contributing to a two-tier state system.

But while the grant-maintained and specialist schools programmes have since been abolished, other examples of diversity within the system still exist. Research has shown that faith schools (which account for around a third of all maintained schools in England) are more likely to have advantaged intakes (Allen and West, 2009; 2011). A recent study of the top 500 comprehensives also found that these high-achieving schools were both more likely to have a faith character and take substantially fewer poorer children than would be expected based on their local area (The Sutton Trust, 2013). As more faith schools (representing a wider range of faiths) enter the market via the Free Schools programme, it will be important to establish whether this picture of advantaged intakes remains the same.

The Academies programme has been one of the most significant and encompassing structural initiatives of recent times. Like earlier grant-maintained schools and CTCs, academies operate independently of LA control and have additional freedoms in relation to their budgets, staffing, admissions and curriculum. There have been ongoing debates about their educational benefits but concern has also been raised about their impact on access and opportunity for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The original sponsored academies were designed to replace failing schools and serve disadvantaged pupils in deprived urban areas. However,

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studies showed that in many cases the social profiles of the pupils attending were quite different (and more advantaged) to those of the predecessor schools (Curtis et al., 2008; PwC, 2008; Wilson, 2011). The rapid expansion of the policy in 2010 via the converter academies initiative also allowed thousands of other schools to adopt academy status, raising concerns that these schools would use their additional freedoms to be more selective with their intakes (Academies Commission, 2013). Most recently, Gorard (2014) found that converter academies are considerably less likely to take an equal share of poorer pupils and their existence within a local area is strongly associated with higher levels of between school stratification. Free Schools were another type of academy introduced in 2010. Whilst there are still only a small number of these schools in existence at present, the early evidence suggests that, on the whole, they are not taking an equal share of disadvantaged pupils (Green et al., 2015; Morris, 2015).