By Jake Anders

In April, CEPEO launched New Opportunities: our evidence-based policy priorities for equalising opportunities. As part of an ongoing series, each week we are highlighting one of our priorities and the reasoning and evidence behind them. This week, we are focusing on school admissions, an area where we see huge disparities in access to high-performing schools by socio-economic status. In this blog post, we discuss two key reasons for this — the importance of distance to school in admission criteria, and the continuing existence of grammar school systems in parts of the UK.

Pupils from more advantaged backgrounds are more likely to attend schools that get better results in national tests. In London, pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) attend, on average, schools where 59% of pupils achieve 5 passes or higher at GCSE, compared to 65% for non-FSM students. The gap is wider outside London at 8 percentage points between FSM and non-FSM eligible young people. This means that non-FSM students have access to schools where there is a higher chance of achieving academic success, which can have significant implications for their future prospects.

People sometimes suggest that this is because less advantaged families differ in their approach to choosing schools. But analysis of families’ preferences for secondary schools suggests this is not the main cause of the difference. Families of FSM pupils are only slightly more likely than more advantaged families to express a preference for only a single secondary school, or to make their closest school their first preference. This suggests little systematic difference in the degree of active engagement with school choice.

What, then, actually explains the difference? The disparity is driven by the fact that more affluent families are more likely to live in the proximity of good schools (including due to deliberately moving house to be near a good school), combined with admissions rules that prioritise distance in their decisions.

Schools typically apply admissions rules that consider the distance from prospective pupils’ homes. While this makes sense if all schools are equally good for all pupils, given the reality of disparities in school quality, it ends up limiting the ability of some pupils (disproportionately from less advantaged backgrounds) to access the best school to which they could reasonably travel. This means that disadvantaged families are limited in their ability to access schools with the characteristics they desire.

This is particularly important as parents and pupils seem to do a good job of picking schools for their children, if they are able to exercise that choice. Recent work has found that pupils who get into their first choice school do better than if they attend one of their lower-ranked schools, and this boost is not explained by any differences in overall effectiveness between the two schools.

Another feature of our school admissions system that is a major disruptor to fair access to high-quality schools for all pupils is grammar schools.

Grammar schools (which are allowed to select their students based on tests purporting to measure academic ability) are highly socially selective. In the areas where a grammar school operates there are stark differences in attendance at that grammar school by socioeconomic status. Just 6% of pupils from the most deprived backgrounds attend a grammar school. It is not until the 90th percentile of the socioeconomic status distribution that we see more than half of students attending a grammar school. The top percentile group, however, has a grammar school attendance rate of 80%.

And this is not just because of correlations between academic attainment and socioeconomic status. Pupils with the same level of attainment in their end of Key Stage 2 tests (taken in the same school year as grammar school entry tests are sat) are much more likely to go on to attend a grammar school if they are from advantaged backgrounds. This suggests that high-attaining young people from less advantaged backgrounds are less likely to be taking the grammar school entry tests, or are doing less well in those tests than we would expect from other measures of their attainment. This latter factor could well be explained by the big differences in private tutoring by family income.

And if you live in a grammar school area then missing out on a place matters for long-term life chances. High-attaining pupils living in such areas who miss out are less likely to go on to higher education. If they do, their chances of attending a high-status university and achieving a good degree classification are lower compared to equivalent pupils who went to grammar schools.

Across both of these issues, reforms to school admissions could make a significant difference in equalising opportunities. Reducing the importance of distance to school and, hence, the link between family income and school attended could make a significant difference to life chances. Even better, requiring schools to prioritise applicants who are eligible for the pupil premium, or, more radically, introducing a degree of random assignment of pupils to schools within certain areas would help to level this aspect of the education playing field.

Jake Anders is Associate Professor and Deputy Director at UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities, and Principal Investigator of the COVID Social Mobility & Opportunities study (COSMO).

Gill Wyness

The UK is the only country in the world in which young people make their university applications before they have received their exam results. Instead, pupils apply to university with grades that have been predicted by their teachers.

The problem is predicted grades aren’t always accurate. Analysis of UCAS data has shown that only 16% of applicants achieve the A-level grades they were predicted to achieve, while 75% of students are over-predicted. The same research showed that among equally high attaining students, disadvantaged students receive less generous predictions compared to more advantaged students, highlighting that there are systematic differences in predicted grades across student groups.

Teacher predicted grades have always been controversial, but were thrown into the spotlight during the pandemic, when exams were cancelled, and teacher predictions were pupils’ only means of proving their achievement levels. Of course, there will always be some degree of error in predicting student grades. Research has shown that even when relying on machine learning and advanced statistical techniques, it is only possible to accurately predict the grades of 1 in 4 students from their attainment in previous years and characteristics. This demonstrates that teachers are certainly not to blame for inaccuracies in predicted grades, and also highlights that this difficult and time-consuming task may not be an ideal use of their limited resources. But it also demonstrates that we cannot simply shift the responsibility of the assignment of predicted grades away from them easily.

The fact that there are systematic errors in predicted grades is important. Predicted grades are an integral process of students’ decision-making, being the main piece of evidence they submit to university courses. The fact that high attaining disadvantaged students and state school students receive less generous grades than their more advantaged and independent school counterparts is likely to have consequences for their decisions on which courses to apply to. High attaining disadvantaged students are more likely to ‘undermatch’ and enter courses which are less selective than expected, given their grades, which leads to higher chances of dropping out, receiving a lower class degree, and earning less in the future.

The alternative to teacher predicted grades, used by every other major education system worldwide, is a post-qualification application (PQA) system. This would allow students to make university applications after they have taken their A-level exams and received their results. This system would be more accurate, fairer, and bring the UK in line with the rest of the world in allowing students to make these life changing application decisions based on full information.

It is possible to move towards PQA with minimum disruption to the current education system. Two proposals for achieving this are as follows: the first option would be to condense the final exam period to 4 weeks, and accelerate exam marking to 7-8 weeks. Examinations would take place in early May. Students would return to school afterwards, receiving their results in mid-July, in time for an in-school ‘applications week’. Universities would then have a month to process and make offers at the end of August, and students would have a short time to accept their favoured choice.

A second option would be to shorten the school summer holidays, allowing pupils to sit their exams and receive their grades during term time, and then make their university applications before the school holidays begin. Alternatively, first year university students could start later, giving them more time to process applications. We outline these options in more detail in a previous blog post.

We cannot ignore the flaws of a system that grants and denies young people the opportunity to have full information on their achievement levels before making such important and life-changing decisions. Put simply, if we were starting from scratch, no-one would design a system like this one. Young people deserve the chance to have their applications assessed in light of their actual achievements.