Ellen Greaves

What Parents Want: School Preferences and School Choice

Parental demand for academic performance is a key element in the view that strengthening school choice will drive up school performance. In this paper we analyse what parents look for in choosing schools. We assemble a unique dataset combining survey information on parents’ choices plus a rich set of socio-economic characteristics; administrative data on school characteristics, admissions criteria and allocation rules; and spatial data attached to a pupil census to define the de facto set of schools available to each family in the survey. To achieve identification, we focus on cities where the school place allocation system is truth-revealing (“equal preferences”). We take great care in trying to capture the set of schools that each family could realistically choose from. We also look at a large subset of parents who continued living in the same house as before the child was born, to avoid endogenous house/school moves. We then model the choices made in terms of the characteristics of schools and families and the distances involved. School characteristics include measures of academic performance, school socio-economic and ethnic composition, and its faith school status. Initial results showed strong differences in the set of choices available to parents in different socio-economic positions. Our central analysis uses multinomial logistic regression to show that families do indeed value academic performance in schools. They also value school composition – preferring schools with low fractions of children from poor families. We compute trade-offs between these characteristics as well as between these and distance travelled. We are able to compare these trade-offs for different families. Our results suggest that preferences do not vary greatly between different socio-economic groups once constraints are fully accounted for.

Test scores, subjective assessment and stereotyping of ethnic minorities

We assess whether ethnic minority pupils are subject to low teacher expectations. We exploit the English testing system of “quasi-blind” externally marked tests and “nonblind” internal assessment to compare differences in these assessment methods between white and ethnic minority pupils. We find evidence that some ethnic groups are systematically underassessed relative to their white peers, while some are overassessed. We propose a stereotype model in which a teacher’s local experience of an ethnic group affects assessment of current pupils; this is supported by the data.

Parental choice of primary school in England: what types of school do different types of family really have available to them?

This article focuses on the constraints on parental choice of school caused by geographical location, which arise due to the reliance on geographical proximity as the key oversubscription criterion for allocating school places. We investigate the assumption that most families really can choose between a range of different schools, and ask what types of school are genuinely accessible to different types of pupil. Using an innovative combination of survey and administrative data, we first determine what types of school are located near different family types. We then investigate how many of these different types of school are really available to the student, based on current catchment areas of schools and the home location of the child. This enables us to assess how access is determined by geography, and how it differs both by school type and by type of family. We show that using proximity as the main criterion to determine access to most schools affects pupils’ probability of securing a place at a particular school, with higher socio-economic status (SES) pupils being more likely to be accepted into (nearer) more advantaged schools. We argue that the large differences in the range of schools genuinely available to different families, coupled with the use of proximity as a tie-break device, continues to be a significant barrier to reducing inequality of access in the English school system.