2010 - School Assignment, School Choice and Social Mobility

Attribution: Burgess, Simon, & Briggs, Adam
Researchers: Adam BriggsSimon Burgess
University Affiliation: Centre for Market & Public Organisation
Email: simon.burgess@bristol.ac.uk
Research Question:
Estimates the chances of poor and non-poor children getting places in good schools by analyzing the relationship between poverty, location and school assignment.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Economics of Education Review
Journal Entry: Vol .29, No. 4, pp. 639-649
Year: 2010
Findings:
  • Children from poor families are 16.5 percentage points less likely to attend a good school. This is equivalent to about half the chance of non-poor families.
  • Children from poor families face a reduced chance of being assigned to a good school in large part because of where they live.
  • Children from poor families do go to lower scoring schools on average. This effect is around 1.5 percentage points, around 9% of the standard error of school quality in this dataset.
  • Most of the reason for poor children’s lower chances is accounted for by where they live, but not all of it.
  • In a typical LEA in England a child from a poor family is half as likely to attend a good secondary school as a non-poor child.
Keywords: ChoicePovertySchool QualitySESRegions: InternationalMethodologies: QuantitativeResearch Designs: Secondary DataAnalysis Methods: Fixed Effects Regression Models Sampling Frame:Students in UK
Sampling Types: PopulationAnalysis Units: SchoolStudentData Types: Quantitative-Longitudinal
Data Description:
  • Sample consists of 1,239,888 state secondary school students and is based upon the school they join at age 11.
  • Student level data:
  • Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) and other components of the National Pupil
  • Database (NPD) from 2002-2004
  • PLASC is is a census of all children in state schools in England, taken each year in January
  • Variables include gender, within-year age, ethnicity, indicator of Special Educational Needs (SEN), indicator of family poverty measured as eligibility for Free School Meals (FSM)
  • School level data:
  • Proportion of a school’s pupils achieving grades A to C in at least five GCSE exams at age 16
  • Location and distance data:
  • Uses student and school postal codes
  • Matches postal codes to Mosaic classification dataset which categorizes each postcode in the UK into one of 61 different types on the basis of demographics, socio-economics and consumption, financial measures, and property characteristics and value
  • Also matched postal codes to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) produced from administrative data which ranks every ward from 1 to 11 on a range of criteria (income, employment, health, education and skills, housing, and geographical access to services)
  • DV: Quality of schools measured as proportion of students eligible for Free School Meals
  • IV: Demographics, socio-economic measures, property characteristics
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:
Archives: K-12 Integration, Desegregation, and Segregation Abstracts