The secret garden of school segregation in the UK: private schools, social class and geography

Socio-economic segregation in UK schools has primarily been explored through analysing Free School Meals (FSM) as a marker of deprivation. By incorporating data on social class and private schools, we seek to explore the “secret garden” of UK school segregation research. Firstly, we analyse social class segregation rather than a deprivation-based measure. Secondly, we include private schools – a major source of inequality, often omitted due to missing data. Finally, we undertake a pan-UK analysis with a greater degree of geographical and school type detail than previously possible in comparisons between Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England. Using first year university records from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for 2017-2019, we construct parental National Statistical Socio-Economic Classification (NSSEC) profiles for 3270 UK post-16 institutions. HESA data comes with substantial limitations due to the omission of students not attending university; we examine the limits of our analyses in detail. Our results confirm earlier studies’ findings that England is the most segregated of the UK’s school systems, even excluding private schools. We also analyse segregation regionally and at the Local Authority (LA) scale and find that London’s boroughs are particularly highly segregated. Private schools appear to play a particularly strong role in polarising urban school markets, raising school segregation considerably. They also appear to increase segregation more than grammar schools when both are present. Regression analyses further indicate that the segregating effect of private and selective schools intensifies in more disadvantaged LAs, a pattern that is robust to controls for attainment and cross-boundary enrolment.