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We investigate parents' preferences for school attributes in a unique data set of survey, administrative, census and spatial data. Using a conditional logit, incorporating characteristics of households, schools and home-school distance, we show that most families have strong preferences for schools' academic performance. Parents also value schools' socio-economic composition and distance, which may limit the potential of school choice to improve academic standards. Most of the variation in preferences for school quality across socio-economic groups arises from differences in the quality of accessible schools rather than differences in parents' preferences, although more advantaged parents have stronger preferences for academic performance.Strong parental demand for academic performance is a central element of the view that strengthening school choice will drive up school performance . As school choice is a widely endorsed school improvement policy, this assumption is also an important policy issue, and the academic and policy debates on school choice are both controversial and unresolved (Hoxby, 2003). We contribute to this debate by offering new evidence on the nature and heterogeneity of parents' preferences for schools. We address three key questions. First, what school attributes do families value? Is the school's academic attainment record important, or do other factors out-weigh it? Second, how much do preferences differ between families of different socio-economic status? Answering these questions helps to explain the disproportionate admission of children from poor families to academically low-performing schools (Burgess and Briggs, 2009). Finally, we provide evidence on the degree to which this arises through differences in preferences for school attributes as opposed to constraints caused by differences in the attributes of available accessible schools.To address these questions we assemble a unique data set. We use survey information on parents' primary school choices and a rich set of family socio-economic and neighbourhood characteristics. We link this to administrative data on the characteristics of schools, and the nature of the local school choice mechanism. To identify

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There is currently a debate in policy circles about access to "the upper echelons of power" (Sir John Major, ex Prime Minister, 2013). This research seeks to understand the relationship between family background and early access to top occupations. We find that privately educated graduates are a third more likely to enter into high status occupations than state educated graduates from similarly affluent families and neighbourhoods. A modest part of this difference is driven by educational attainment with a larger part of the story working through the university that the privately educated graduates attend. Staying on to do a Masters and higher degree is also a (smaller) part of the picture. We explore one potential mechanism which is often posited as a route in accessing top jobs: the role of networks. We find that although networks cannot account for the private school advantage, the use of networks provides an additional advantage over and above background and this varies by the type of top occupation that the graduate enters. A private school graduate who uses personal networks to enter into a top managerial position has a 1.5 percentage point advantage (on a baseline 6.1%) over a state school graduate who uses other ways to find their job. JEL classification: J62, L14