1Few national societies are comprised of a single ethnic group; most populations contain at least one ethnic minority, and in many cases there are tensions between the majority and minority groups (Mikesell and Murphy, 1991). Studies often link those tensions to their spatial structuring, especially to the levels of segregation – both residential and between schools. Such segregation, it is argued, can both stimulate and exacerbate ‘them and us’ group representations. The relative absence of inter-group contact may lead to mutual ignorance and, often, mistrust, with groups developing separate identities that can incorporate conflicting value systems. Whereas residential segregation is frequently associated with such developments – and the tensions that occasionally generate inter-group violent conflict – segregation between schools is considered potentially more damaging; if young people have little contact with other groups during their formative childhood years, the seeds of mutual ignorance and mistrust sown then may be difficult to overcome in adult life. Furthermore, studies – of Danish and Dutch cities, for example (Rangvid, 2007; Boterman, 2013) – have shown that ethnic segregation tends to be greater in a city’s schools than in its residential neighbourhoods, probably as a consequence of parental choices for their children’s education. Similar concerns have been raised in Great Britain, where the ethnic minority populations have expanded substantially in recent decades (Hamnett, 2012) and parental choice has apparently exacerbated the intensity of segregation between schools, reflecting either or both of parental preferences for their children to attend schools with their ethnic peers and their preference for particular types of schools (e.g. religious schools); alternatively, the choices available to different ethnic groups may not be equal (West and Hind, 2007; Hamnett et al., 2013).

• 7 But see Simon Burgess’s refutation of that conclusion: http://www.integrationhub.net/are-we-headed- (...)

When children being educated in segregated schools are also growing up in an area where all [sic] of their neighbours are from the same ethnic and/or faith background, it vastly reduces opportunities for them to mix with others from different backgrounds. It deprives them of the benefits – individually and to society as a whole – that are known to derive from mixing with people from different backgrounds (p.49)7.

The basic pattern

7The second column of Table 1 uses data from the 2011 NPD, and shows the percentage of all pupils at state-funded English primary schools where White British pupils were in a minority. (The NPD data refer to England only; some 5 per cent of all primary school pupils there attend independent schools, which are excluded from the NPD and these analyses.) The same general pattern emerges as in the first column. Almost one-fifth (19.6 per cent) of all primary students attended a school where White British students were in the minority, but this was the case for only 5.2 per cent of White British pupils (of whom there were 1.5 million, 74 per cent of the national total). Among the minority ethnic groups, whereas only 27.3 per cent of Chinese pupils attended schools with a White British minority presence, by comparison in each of the three named South Asian groups (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) and the three Black groups (Black African, Black Caribbean and Black Other) – on which six almost all research and public attention focuses – more than 60 per cent of their primary-school-age children attended schools where White British were in a minority, as many as 81.2 per cent for Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils.

8These initial data in the first two columns of Table 1 clearly imply that in 2011 England’s primary schools were more segregated ethnically than the neighbourhoods that they served – for all of the non-White ethnic groups except the Chinese a smaller proportion of their populations lived in neighbourhoods with White British minorities than had their children attending primary schools with non-White British minorities only. But a comparison of pupils with the (all-age) Census population is not exact because it is not clear whether this simply reflects differences in the age composition of the different ethnic groups; primary school-age children comprised just 5.2 per cent of the total White British population in 2011, for example, but 11 per cent of those claiming either Bangladeshi or Pakistani ethnicity and 12 per cent in the Black Other group. The median age for the White British was 40-44 years in 2011; for the Bangladeshi population it was some twenty years younger.

9The third column in Table 1 provides some circumstantial evidence that age differences are indeed the reason for this difference. Under a system offering a degree of choice for parents, schools do not have fixed, spatially-defined catchment areas; most children can apply to attend most schools, albeit that their likelihood of receiving a place is affected by factors such as whether they have a sibling in a school applied to and how close to the school they live. How to define the catchment areas of schools has been an area of academic debate (Pearce, 2000; Harris and Johnston, 2008, 2011; Singleton et al., 2011; Harris et al., 2015). In general, however, we can work backwards to identify each school’s core and empirically observed recruitment space. From the NPD we identify the postcodes of those who attend each school and draw a boundary around the central 80 per cent (the remaining 20 per cent is omitted to exclude spatial ‘outliers’, individuals who for a variety of reasons live at most distance from the school relative to other pupils). Once the catchments are defined, the ethnic make-up of the pupils that live in them can be revealed (whether or not they attended that school).

10In all cases, comparison of the first and third columns of Table 1 shows that the percentage of pupils living in a catchment where White British are in a minority (the third column) is larger than the percentage of neighbourhoods with White British minorities (the first column) – very substantially so for the six main ethnic minority groups (the three claiming South Asian ethnic identities – Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi – and the three claiming Black identities – African, Caribbean and Other); 56.7 per cent of all Black Africans live in neighbourhoods with White British minorities, for example, but 83.4 per cent of their children aged 5-11 attend a school with a White British minority. In part this will be because the catchments are modelled on the intakes into the schools so if schools are segregated then the catchments are likely to be so too. Consider a situation where each pupil attends her or his nearest school and that nearest school is the same for all pupils in a neighbourhood. In this circumstance the composition of the school, the composition of the catchment, and the composition of the neighbourhood will all be the same because the catchments are defined in terms of the entries into the school and the catchments are made-up of neighbourhoods. In practice, and especially in urban areas (where the minority groups are more likely to live), there is much greater fluidity: in England less than half of pupils attend the nearest primary school. The catchments therefore enclose a wider mix of pupils than just those who attend the school.

11The strong suggestion arising from these summary data is that ethnic minority children of primary school age are spatially more concentrated across residential areas than all members of their groups and that this could be a major reason for any observed greater segregation in schools than their surrounding neighbourhoods. To address that issue further, the next section presents analyses of aggregate data – at the school level – derived from the NPD which examine differences between the ethnic composition of schools and their catchment areas.

The ethnic composition of primary schools and their catchment areas

12The NPD contains individual information on all pupils in the English state-education system, including their home postcode and the school that they attend – for which information about its characteristics are also available. Using this information it is possible not only to discern each school’s ethnic composition but also the composition of its catchment area.

17Community schools are those owned and managed by the Local Education Authority – a County Council, London Borough Council, or Metropolitan Borough Council – which apply common admissions criteria, giving substantial weight to the proximity of an applicant’s home to the school, and so serve their local area;

18Voluntary Aided schools are also state-funded but a foundation (in most cases a religious body) contributes to the capital costs (perhaps owning the land and/or buildings) and appoints a majority of the governors, who have greater autonomy than is the case with Community schools – notably over admissions criteria, which can include, for example, adherence to a particular religious faith;

20Foundation schools are state-owned and -funded schools established after 1998 when creation of further grant-maintained schools (i.e. voluntary-controlled but not also voluntary-aided) was abolished: their governors (up to one-quarter of whom are appointed by the Foundation’s Trust) have slightly greater independence than Community schools; most of the institutions in this category are secondary schools – 15 per cent of all secondary schools compared to only 2 per cent of all primary schools.

22Following the descriptions of the various school types, the outlier schools in Figure 1, where the proportion of pupils from South Asian and Black (SAB) ethnic groups is significantly smaller than the proportion in their catchment areas, are likely to be other than Community schools and have a faith foundation, because parents from a wider area have chosen to send their children there; those with substantially more SAB pupils than the catchment area are more likely to be Community schools. To test that hypothesis, the outliers from the regression of the data shown in Figure 1 were defined as those with standardised residuals either less than -2.0SD or greater than +2.0SD. Their distributions across the institutional types and denominations are shown in Table 2.

23Those distributions substantially confirm the hypothesis that schools whose ethnic composition differs substantially from the ethnic composition of their core catchment area differ in their institutional situation, compared to all schools in the selected Local Education Authorities. In particular, those with fewer SAB pupils than expected (the negative residuals in the final column of Table 2) – and thus, by implication, more White British pupils than expected from the general relationship – are much more likely than is the case across all schools to be Voluntary Aided and associated with a Roman Catholic foundation; whereas only 14 per cent of all primary schools in the LEAs studied were affiliated to the Roman Catholic church, that was the case with 48 per cent of those with substantially fewer SAB pupils than expected from the ethnic mix of their catchment areas. Relative few South Asian families adhere to the Roman Catholic faith, hence those schools are less likely to be chosen by SAB families for their children, even if they are the closest to their home. As a consequence, such schools are more likely to have a large proportion of White British pupils, some of whom may travel greater distances than average in order to attend such a school with its particular religious ethos. By comparison, many more of the schools with unexpectedly large SAB pupil numbers compared to their local catchment (the positive residuals in the second column) are Community schools. A considerable number are Voluntary Aided, however, many of them associated with either the Church of England or the Roman Catholic church, both of which faiths are supported by a substantial number of Black families. Of the schools with substantially more SAB students than predicted by the regression equation associated with Figure 1, of those associated with the Church of England, just under 60 per cent of their pupils are Black; only 2 per cent of the pupils at Roman Catholic schools are South Asian. But of the Community schools in that grouping, 59 per cent of their pupils are South Asian and 13 per cent Black.

Geographical variations

25These results suggest a general pattern across all of the Local Education Authorities (LEAs) with large SAB components to their primary school populations. But are there geographical variations? Figure 2 shows the comparable graphs to that in Figure 1 for three separate urban LEAs plus all of London’s LEAs, and indicates a clear difference between the first three and the last. In Blackburn and Bradford, two northern cities where residential segregation of SAB households (predominantly South Asian) is relatively high (Johnston, Poulsen et al., 2016), there is a clear dichotomy reflecting that residential segregation (Figures 2a and 2b). The great majority of schools there have catchments that are either predominantly SAB in their ethnic composition or contain very few SAB pupils and the schools reflect that situation: most of them are in either the upper right or lower left corner of the graph. Few schools and few catchment areas lie between those two extremes, although in both cities there is a small number of cases where the catchment areas’ proportions of SAB pupils are much larger than those of the enrolled school population; six of the thirteen in Bradford with substantially fewer SAB pupils than expected were Voluntary Aided schools affiliated with the Roman Catholic church.

27Finally, London (Figure 2d) is very different, reflecting the greater diversity of its neighbourhoods compared to virtually all of the other Local Education Authorities examined and the greater density of schools there: whereas in Blackburn and Birmingham 44 and 40 per cent of all pupils respectively attended their nearest primary school, for example, the percentage was much lower in most London Boroughs, falling to 24 per cent in Hammersmith & Fulham. Compared to Blackburn, Bradford and Birmingham relatively few London schools have catchment areas where 90 per cent or more of the pupils are from the SAB ethnic minority groups and few schools there have as many as 90 per cent of their pupils drawn from those groups. There is a clustering of schools in the lower left quadrant, reflecting that many parts of London remain predominantly White. There are also some schools where there are many fewer SAB pupils enrolled than living in the catchment area, but there is also a large number of schools – many more relatively than in the other three LEAs shown in Figure 2 – with a mixed ethnic composition. Indeed, the situation in those three is typical of all of the non-London LEAs (shown in Figure 3). The towns and cities with large SAB populations outside London (especially those with large South Asian populations) are residentially more segregated than the capital city (Johnston, Poulsen et al., 2016), and their schools reflect that situation: many more London neighbourhoods and schools have mixed ethnic populations than is the case elsewhere in the country.

Student flows: a case study

28The results of the aggregate analyses reported above suggest that in the great majority of cases the ethnic composition of English primary schools reflects that of their modelled catchment areas; most of the exceptions where the school’s population comprises many fewer SAB pupils than its catchment area are Voluntary Aided institutions with faith-based foundations. The implication is that most pupils attend a nearby school but because in a dense urban environment most homes have several primary schools within easy reach parents do not necessarily apply to – or have their children allocated to – the nearest. So how do the areas in which they live and the schools to which they send their children differ in terms of their ethnic composition?

29To address that question we use the data on all children living in and attending state primary schools in Birmingham – there were just under 50,000 of them in 2011. There were on average 4.4 schools within one kilometre of each home and 27.3 within seven kilometres. Among those pupils, only 33 per cent of Blacks, 37 per cent of White British and 50 per cent of South Asians attended a school that was the nearest to their home.

30Each school has been placed into one of four categories, according to the share of its pupils who were either South Asian or Black. Table 4 contrasts the ethnic composition of the nearest school to each pupil’s home to that of the school attended, also using that fourfold classification. Thus, for example, among White British students whose nearest school had less than 25 per cent of its pupils from the SAB minorities (the first row in the first block of data) 92 per cent of them attended a school with a similar percentage drawn from the SAB groups whereas only 0.1 per cent of them attended a school where 75 per cent or more of the students were SAB. By contrast, for White British students whose nearest school was 75 per cent or more SAB (the final row in that block) only 31.5 per cent of them attended a school that was 75 per cent or more SAB and 18.2 per cent attended a school (clearly not the one in whose catchment they lived) that was less than 25 per cent SAB. Among South Asian and Black students (the second block of data in the table), of those whose nearest school was 75 per cent or more SAB (the final row in that block) 89.2 per cent attended a school that was 75 per cent or more SAB. Of those living in catchment areas of schools that were less than 25 per cent SAB, on the other hand (the first row in that block of data), only 64 per cent attended a school with a similar ethnic composition.

31This table shows a marked difference between Birmingham’s White British and SAB pupils. Among the former, the great majority (92 per cent) of those whose nearest school was less than 25 per cent SAB attended a school with a similar non-SAB population. Of those whose nearest school had a higher SAB percentage, the great majority attended either a school with the same or one with a lower percentage. Few White British pupils attended a school whose SAB percentage was greater than that of their nearest. The reverse was the case with South Asian and Black pupils, however; they were much more likely to attend a school with a higher SAB percentage than that of their nearest establishment. This suggests a polarisation – White British pupils gravitating towards schools with lower SAB percentages than their nearest, and SAB pupils moving in the opposite direction.

32If we analyse just those pupils who didn’t attend their nearest school, this difference comes into sharper focus in Table 5, which is constructed in the same way as Table 4. Of Birmingham’s White British pupils who did not attend the nearest primary school to their home, the great majority went to one with a smaller percentage of SAB pupils than their nearest school. Indeed of those whose nearest school was 50-75 per cent SAB (the third row of the first block of data in the table) only 16 per cent attended a school with the same percentage range and fully 78 per cent went to another school with a smaller percentage SAB – over one-third of them to a school where South Asians and Blacks made up less than one-quarter of the complement. On the other hand, of Birmingham’s South Asian and Black pupils who attended a school other than that closest to their home, most went to a school where the SAB percentage was larger than that for the one nearest to their home; of those where their nearest school had less than 25 per cent of its students SAB (the first row in the second block of data), for example, over half attended schools with a larger percentage of their student population than 25 drawn from the SAB groups.

33Finally, Table 6 looks at those White British pupils whose nearest school was more than 75 per cent SAB and who did not attend that school; it shows the percentage of pupils in the schools that they attended who were South Asian or Black and its institutional type. Those who attended a school very different in its ethnic composition from that nearest their home – i.e. less than 25 per cent SAB – were very likely to attend a Voluntary Aided school, associated with the Roman Catholic Church. The greater the similarity between their nearest school and that attended in terms of their SAB percentage, the more likely it was that they attended a Community school with no associated faith foundation.

Conclusions

34The core conclusion to be drawn from these analyses is that across those parts of urban England that have relatively large ethnic minority populations there is no clear evidence that primary schools are more segregated ethnically than the neighbourhoods that they recruit from. In general, the ethnic composition of a school’s catchment area – defined as the core area from which it draws 80 per cent of its pupils – is very similar to that of the school itself. The schools reflect their local neighbourhoods even though, as the Birmingham case study shows, a majority of pupils do not attend the nearest school to their home. Most parts of those towns and cities have several primary schools within easy reach and most parents, it seems, either apply for their children to attend one of those nearby or, given the operating constraints (in particular the number of applications for each school relative to the number of places available), have their children allocated to a local, if not the closest, Community school. Not surprisingly, with such a density of schools it is likely that virtually all of them have a catchment area with a similar ethnic composition to their nearest neighbours.

35However, a small number of schools have an ethnic composition very different from that of their local neighbourhoods – and, as the graphs presented here show, these are more likely to have many fewer ethnic minority pupils than the catchment area than to have many more (there are more extreme outliers in the bottom right than the top left quadrants of the scatter diagrams in Figure 2). Many of these are Voluntary Aided schools associated with a religious foundation, particularly the Roman Catholic church. Some families associated with this faith send their children to such schools even though there may be one or more Community schools closer to their home. Indeed, because such Voluntary Aided schools have greater control over their admissions procedures than Community schools, non-Roman Catholic families may find it harder to have their children accepted to such schools near to their homes even if they preferred them to go there. To some extent parents may use a faith-based establishment to ensure that their children attend schools with fewer South Asian and Black pupils than those nearest to their homes, but there is no convincing evidence that this is the case in large numbers; certainly it does not appear to be a major feature of the school system.