Pupil clustering in English secondary schools: one pattern or several?

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractPrevious international work has shown that clustering pupils with similar characteristics in particular schools yields no clear academic benefit, and can be disadvantageous both socially and personally. Understanding how and why this clustering happens, and how it may be reduced, is therefore important for policy. Yet previous work has tended to focus on only one kind of clustering at a time. In the USA, for example, black:white segregation of pupils has been the key issue. In the UK, and across Europe, the focus has been on social background, especially on the segregation of pupils living in poverty. With access to high quality national datasets in England, it is now possible to track the between-school segregation of numerous pupil characteristics over a 15 year period. This paper uses school level figures for all statefunded secondary school pupils in England from 1996 to 2009, including free school meals, special needs, ethnicity and first language. The paper investigates, more fully than has been attempted before, whether segregation in terms of these indicators has a common pattern. It presents evidence for the existence of at least three different processes of between school segregation over this period, and proposes one possible determinant for each, and some future work that could be done to clarify the situation. The paper therefore provides an important corrective to previous work that sought explanation for only one type of segregation. In the allocation of school places, pupils are being clustered in several distinct ways. The standard previous explanations for pupil clustering such as selection by ability or housing, faith-based enrolment, and increased parental choice, apply only to some of these forms of segregation. Patterns of pupils clusteringThis paper uses school-level figures for all state-funded secondary schools in England 1996 to 2009 to investigate whether the pattern of between-school segregation for any one pupil characteristic, like living in poverty, is the same as for any other, including special needs, ethnic origin, and first language. The paper starts by considering some of what is already known about pupil segregation between schools and why this phenomenon is important, before outlining the methods used in this new study. Ensuing sections look at segregation patterns over time and across institutions, and the paper concludes by reprising three possible different patterns of segregation, and

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