Simon Burgess

In the context of ongoing debate about the positive and negative consequences of ethnic diversity for intergroup relations, we study inter-ethnic relations among adolescents in England’s schools. In the first national study of schools throughout England to relate inter-ethnic attitudes to both school and area ethnic composition, we combine survey data collected from 14-year-olds in nearly 100 schools with administrative data. We focus on relations between three ethno-racial categories: White-British, Asian-British and Black-British, for three conceptually distinct indicators of inter-ethnic orientations: warmth, friends, and attitudes. We posit that ‘contact’, proxied by school outgroup composition, should lead to more positive intergroup orientations, while ‘exposure’, proxied by neighbourhood outgroup composition, should lead to more negative intergroup relations. We show that higher school outgroup shares are associated with more positive orientations towards that group for almost all relationships and measures. We further show that for the two instances where higher school outgroup shares do not enhance positive intergroup orientations, they nevertheless moderate negative effects of neighbourhood composition. We conclude that schools offer the opportunity to enhance intergroup relations and to mitigate the threats associated with increased neighbourhood diversity with potentially enduring consequences.

We study school choice in England using a new dataset containing the choices of all parents seeking a school place in state secondary schools. We provide new empirical evidence to inform how the school choice market functions, including the number of choices made, whether the nearest school is the first choice and the probability of an offer from the first choice school. These indicators show that school choice is actively used by many households in England. We use the rich data available to describe how choices vary by pupil, school and neighbourhood characteristics and how school choice is used differently by different groups and in different parts of the country. For the first time, we are able to present national data on how the school choices made by parents vary according to pupils’ ethnic group and across urban and rural areas. We show, contrary to some existing literature that has relied on smaller and less representative samples of parents and pupils, that school choices do not vary significantly by social background. We show that parents pro-actively use the choice system and present new evidence on the extent to which the current school admissions criteria that prioritise distance penalise poorer families.

Between 2004 and 2012, there had been a significant rise in so‐called ‘equivalent’ qualifications taken by young people in England in the final years of their compulsory schooling. These were qualifications other than GCSEs that were approved for young people under the age of 16 under Section 96 of the Learning and Skills Act 2000. This rise was checked by the Wolf review of vocational education, which led to wholesale changes in the set of qualifications that schools offered to pupils, and which primarily affected lower‐attaining students. We quantify the impact of this reform on these pupils with respect to the qualifications they entered and what they achieved. We do so by comparison to previous national cohorts of pupils unaffected by the reform, including the estimation of counterfactual outcomes for the group of pupils most likely to be affected. These pupils tended to enter fewer qualifications overall after the reform than their predecessors, but with a higher fraction of GCSEs. Age‐16 attainment fell, with a lower percentage achieving level 2 of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). This finding is repeated in the post‐16 outcome measures, which were stable throughout this period. There is no evidence from the attainment data that these reforms helped low‐attaining pupils.

We investigate the impact on earnings inequality of a selective education system in which school assignment is based on initial test scores. We use a large, representative household panel survey to compare adult earnings inequality of those growing up under a selective education system with those educated under a comprehensive system in England. Controlling for a range of background characteristics and the current location, the wage distribution for individuals who grew up in selective schooling areas is substantially and significantly more unequal. The total effect sizes are large: 24% of the raw 90–10 earnings gap and 19% of the conditional 90–10 earnings gap can be explained by differences across schooling systems.

We study the market for teachers in England, in particular teacher turnover. We show that there is a positive raw association between the level of school disadvantage and the turnover rate of its teachers. This association diminishes as we control for school, pupil and local teacher labour market characteristics, but is not eliminated. The remaining association is largely accounted for by teacher characteristics, with the poorer schools hiring much younger teachers on average. We interpret this market equilibrium allocation as either deriving from the preferences of young teachers, or as reflecting the low market attractiveness of disadvantaged schools.