A Tale of Two Cities: the impact of parental choice on admissions to primary schools in Edinburgh and Dundee

Abstract

Section 28A of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980 gives parents in Scotland the right to choose the schools which they wish their children to attend. As of 1982, parents can make a ‘placing request’ for a school other than the school to which their child is allocated by the local authority, and the request must be granted unless one of a small number of statutory grounds for refusal applies. Before this date, local authorities were free to operate whatever allocation policies they wished, and while some were very flexible, others were not. A larger proportion of parents have made placing requests in the cities than in rural areas, and the majority of requests have been at the start of primary or secondary schooling. We have therefore focused on P1 and S1 requests in two Scottish cities, Dundee and Edinburgh. We report on the P1 requests here. Edinburgh is the larger and more middle class of the two cities, yet the proportion of parents making requests in Edinburgh has been lower than in Dundee. Placing requests at P1 rose from 13 per cent of pupils in 1982 to 19 per cent in 1985. The corresponding figures for Dundee were 15 and 22 per cent. Before the ‘Parents’ Charter’ legislation, Edinburgh operated a more rigid allocation policy than Dundee. The proportion of placing requests was much lower in the Catholic sector, probably because of the larger area served by each school. In both cities there was substantial movement between non‐denominational schools in all parts of the city, with some schools making substantial gains and others suffering substantial losses. In seven out of 38 schools in Dundee more than half the P1 pupils came from outside the catchment area, while in Edinburgh this was true for only three out of 82 schools. Most of the movement between schools involved a move to an adjacent school (83 per cent of all requests in Edinburgh and 85 per cent in Dundee). There are extreme differences in social composition between school catchment areas in both cities. However, similar schools tend to be grouped together in certain areas of the city. Because of the local nature of the P1 requests, movement was predominantly within areas which are homogeneous with respect to social composition and housing tenure. In both cities there is evidence of a set of sub‐systems of movement, usually within these defined areas. The main factors which influenced moves between adjacent schools were similar in the two cities. Movement tended to be towards larger schools and away from schools in areas of economic and social deprivation (measured by unemployment, single parents and lack of car ownership). In Dundee there was no tendency for requests to be made away from schools in council housing schemes, but in Edinburgh there was some evidence of this. However, in both cities, there was considerable local movement which could not be explained by any of these factors. In both cities the moves to non‐adjacent schools were rather different. They tended to be away from local authority housing schemes towards schools in middle‐class areas and areas where a high proportion of adults have been through higher education. Thus the impact of the placing request legislation on the primary school intake has resulted in sharp gains and losses for individual schools. However, these aggregate analyses suggest that the gains and losses are unlikely to have resulted in major changes to the social composition of the schools. This comes about from the local nature of the movement between schools and the social geography of the two cities where the existing school catchment areas seem to follow social as well as physical boundaries.