School reforms widen poverty gap, new research finds

The new government may have settled in, but the detail of future education policy remains unclear. The prime minister, Theresa May and education secretary, Justine Greening, have flagged up their commitment to social mobility. May wants to fight the “burning injustice” of inequality and make Britain a country that works “for everyone”.

But where will that leave the changes made by their predecessors? This week marks the sixth anniversary of the Academies Act, which provided a fast track conversion process. The first wave of the equally contentious free schools celebrate their fifth birthday in September. The former education secretary Michael Gove claimed these changes would offer parents more choice and improve the chances of the poorest children. But how far has this promise been realised? There are now 5,302 academies and 304 free schools – and the Cameron government’s pledge that all non-academy schools should eventually convert has not been retracted.

Yet evidence that academies and free schools don’t necessarily improve results, or narrow attainment gaps, comes thick and fast. Research published three weeks ago by the new Education Policy Institute, whose executive chair, David Laws, was schools minister in the coalition government, reinforced this message.

A new analysis of the intakes of all schools suggests that, far from widening access for poorer children, the changes that May and Greening must contemplate accelerating have reinforced existing patterns of social segregation and in some cases exacerbated them.

In practice the English school system has always been diverse and includes many schools that are much more – or much less – inclusive of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Timo Hannay, a former research scientist and founder of education data analysis company SchoolDash, says these have typically been grammar schools, some faith schools, Roman Catholic schools, single sex secondary schools and schools rated “outstanding” by Ofsted.

But SchoolDash has crunched the most up-to-date DfE figures to compare the percentage of children in each school eligible for free school meals (FSM) with the government’s measurement of local deprivation, known as IDACI – income deprivation affecting children index.

The results suggest converter academies and primary free schools also tend to have a lower proportion of disadvantaged pupils than their communities.

Only sponsored academies (more likely to have been schools previously in difficulty) tend to have a higher proportion, while secondary free schools are more in line with the local populations.

“Our analysis looks at the extent to which schools disproportionately exclude poorer pupils after taking into account the level of poverty in their areas,” says Hannay. “In certain types of schools there seems to be a tension between choice and social cohesion. Living close to a school doesn’t always translate into being able to send your child there. Some outlier schools have intakes that are wildly different from the local population mix. We need to ask why that is.”

SchoolDash scatter graphs, marking every school in the country using DfE data, provide hints to the possible reason. All academies and free schools have control of their own admissions policies. Among those are the Langdale free school in Blackpool, where 2.4% of pupils are eligible for FSM compared with a local IDACI index of 41.5%. Its admissions criteria include selecting some pupils according to their aptitude for music and drama and state that candidates (rising five years old) will be required to provide evidence of “qualifications already gained or to attend an aptitude test”.

Canary Wharf college, in Tower Hamlets, London, has only 5.4% eligible for FSM compared with 30% deprivation in its community. Its admissions criteria run to six pages and include proof of church association or baptism for 50% of its admissions.

Nishkam primary school in Birmingham has only 8.6% FSM compared with 45.5% poor children locally. It also has 50% faith-based criteria, including proof that children don’t cut their hair, are vegetarian and intend to be initiated into the Sikh religion. None of these schools was available to comment on the SchoolDash findings.

West London Free School Academy Trust, founded by journalist Toby Young and perhaps the most high profile of those established rapidly after the 2010 election, also reflects Hannay’s analysis. West London free school primary, and the newer Earl’s Court free school, have intakes with 6.1 % and 6.8% eligible for FSM respectively, compared with 23.8% in the local community, whereas the WLFS secondary has a slightly higher proportion of FSM pupils than the local mix (23.1% compared with 21.2%).

Young admits that attracting primary pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds has proved hard but believes this a product of parental choice as well as admissions. To combat this, his primaries will now prioritise 20% of pupils eligible for the pupil premium.

“Parents in general are more likely to choose the nearest primary – our two current primaries are located in more affluent areas. Parents of secondary pupils, including those on low incomes, are more likely to shop around,” he says.

“Patterns of segregation are difficult to change because they’re driven by parental behaviour. You could change them by significantly reducing parental choice, but that’s politically difficult, particularly when you have an independent school system alongside the public one. Restricting choice in the public sector effectively means denying a choice to the poor but not to the rich. It is difficult to make that the centrepiece of a moral crusade.”

According to Prof Stephen Gorard, of Durham University, who has been looking at school segregation since the 1988 Education Act, “there has always been a degree of social segregation in the English school system and there are marked differences in particular local authority areas”. He says: “Where there is more diversity there tends to be more segregation. Where there are different kinds of schools, such as free schools and academies, they may become an ‘escape route’ of choice.

“Rather than cloud the picture by talking about the bigger determinants of segregation, I have tended to focus on things we can control. We can control how kids are allocated places to schools and create a single type of school that anyone can attend, because where community schools do exist you have the lowest levels of segregation.”

That suggests radical changes to school admissions, which previous governments have been unwilling to contemplate. Anne West, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics, explains: “What we have now is complexity at a school level, where there are often multiple admissions criteria, and complexity at a local level where there are more schools that have control of their admissions.

“It needs to be easier for parents to understand, and managed so that no school can get a specially advantaged intake. Ideally that would mean no school controls its own admissions, locally agreed criteria and local authorities administering the process for all schools. And if we want to make the intakes of all schools more reflective of the local area, there would probably need to be some social engineering to include better and worse-off wards in the catchment areas.”

Even Young agrees that a “universal admissions system” in which admissions are taken away from individual schools and given to the local authority may be necessary.

“In general, an uneven admissions playing field makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of different approaches. As someone who believes school improvement should be research driven, I’m in favour of a universal admissions system.”

There was talk that the white paper published in March would contain such a proposal. In the event it didn’t. If the new secretary of state wants to make her mark and ensure a socially just system with fairer chances for all, she may have no choice.