Exit, choice and loyalty: the impact of parental choice on admissions to secondary schools in Edinburgh and Dundee

Abstract

This paper analyses the effects of parental choice on first‐year admissions to 20 non‐denominational secondary schools in Edinburgh and ten in Dundee. Although Dundee is a more working‐class city than Edinburgh, the take‐up of placing requests in Dundee was somewhat higher than in Edinburgh. There was a substantial increase in the take‐up of placing requests in both cities over the period 1982‐85 (from 13.5% to 21.0% of the S1 intake in Edinburgh and from 14.0% to 23.7% in Dundee). In each city, there was evidence of bandwagon effects ‐ some schools gained an increasing proportion of their S1 intakes through parental choice while others lost an increasing proportion of their intakes for this reason. However, the imposition of intake limits on three of the ‘most popular’ secondary schools in Edinburgh not only decreased the number of requests for those schools but also reduced the outflows from the ‘least popular’ schools. The paper uses logistic regression to calculate the effects of extra travelling distance and a variety of school and catchment area variables on the odds of moving between all possible pairs of schools in the two cities. Distance was the best predictor of movement and few pupils moved to schools which would have entailed much extra travelling; after distance, school attainment measures were most highly correlated with movement. However, stepwise multiple regression indicated that, for schools which were a given distance apart and similar in terms of attainment, moves were towards schools in more working‐class areas. Thus, there was some evidence to suggest that parents were choosing more effective schools. Finally, the paper uses spatial methods to show how placing requests have resulted in large flows out of secondary schools serving the least prosperous local authority housing schemes into adjacent, often previously selective, schools with much more mixed catchment areas, and points to the growth of substantial inequalities among secondary schools which are formally equal in status.