Middle-class lead way in acquiring best school seats

London: Middle-class families monopolise the best schools even when a lottery is used to allocate places, according to a study published recently. Lotteries have been seen by some educationists as a way of reducing deep-seated class divisions in the school system.

The highest-performing schools tend to cluster in the wealthiest neighbourhoods; if places are allocated according to how near a family lives to a school — rather than by a lottery — children from the poorest areas miss out.

Lotteries are said to be used to distribute places in at least one school in up to a third of councils across England. In Brighton and Hove, all pupils have been assigned secondary school places in this way for the past two years. But researchers have found lotteries alone fail to give poor children a higher chance of attending a top school, and marginally narrow the likelihood they will win a place at a high-performing school.

Their study analysed how far Brighton and Hove's lottery admissions system had improved the chances of poor pupils attending top schools, and who the main winners and losers were when places were allocated randomly. The researchers, from the Institute of Education, University of London and the University of Bristol, analysed which schools thousands of pupils attended before and after the lottery system was implemented.

The study is being presented to the British Educational Research Association conference today. Brighton and Hove council does not allocate places entirely randomly.

Parents can apply to any school, but priority is given to those who live within a designated catchment area. First, a lottery is used to decide who gets a place within a catchment area.

A second lottery is used for any spare places that are not filled by those within a school's catchment area. But there are few spare places for children outside the catchment area of the best schools, so the lottery does not help the poorest, the academics found.

Pupils on free school meals a key indicator of poverty were "slightly" more likely to be at school with other pupils on free school meals under Brighton's lottery system than under the previous system that allocated places to families living nearest the school to which they have applied, the academics discovered.