It would be a rare child that would ask “how do I get the most out of the life ahead of me?” The answer that well-meaning adults would give, and often do give even without being asked, is: “work hard”.
But if we were being more honest we’d say: “Work hard, but first make sure you were born in the right place, with the right parents.”
With this in mind, one way to assess educational inequality is to look at how parents choose to educate their children and how this varies across the country.
The map below shows hot-spots where large proportions of pupils attend schools outside the council area in which they live.1
The hottest spot is around Glasgow, though all urban areas around Edinburgh, Stirling, Aberdeen and Dundee show elevated levels. Rural areas, such as the Highlands and Dumfries & Galloway and the Borders, show the lowest levels. No data is published for the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland (coloured black) which, according to a note in the source data, is to “prevent disclosure”, which I presume means that the numbers involved are so small that individual pupils could be identified.
The table below shows more detail for the top 10 hotspots shown on the map.
The first pair of coloured columns shows the percentage of pupils who live in that council area but attend a school in another council area. The second pair of columns show the percentage of pupils who attend school in that council area but live outside it.
It’s perhaps easier to understand it with examples:
- 1.5% of primary school pupils living in East Dunbartonshire attend a school that is not in East Dunbartonshire .
- 10.5% of pupils attending a secondary school in Stirlingshire live outside Stirlingshire.
The “Max” column shows the maximum for that row. This is used to order the rows in the table and also to colour the map.
The average percentages for the whole of Scotland are 1.9% for primary schools and 3.9% for secondary schools. (If you think about it, these percentages must be the same for the “going” and “coming” columns.)
Two points of note
The first is that the percentages are higher for secondary schools than for primary schools. This is presumably because secondary school pupils can travel further from home to school and perhaps also because the choice of secondary school is more crucial to parents.
The second is that the affluent Glasgow suburbs of East Dunbartonshire and East Renfrewhire top the table with about 1 in 5 secondary pupils coming from elsewhere. Glasgow City is third with about 1 in 8 secondary pupils residing there but attending school outside Glasgow. It is of course not a coincidence that these council areas are next to each other. Stirling and Clackmannanshire are similar in that they are neighbouring and have high but opposite percentages for secondary schools.
In summary, we have found some clear patterns in this data. Specifically, it seems that parents in Glasgow are sending their children to suburban schools, with a similar but smaller effect from Clackmannanshire to Stirling.
In subsequent posts I’ll look at this in more detail and see what it can tell us about inequality in education. In the next post I’ll look more closely at the main hot-spot around Glasgow.
This was first published on the author’s blog.
1. The data used to construct the above map and table are for 2016 and were taken from the supplementary data set for the 2016 pupil census. A spreadsheet with all data and calculations will be provided in a future blog post.
David Watt says
Not clear at all to me how placing requests is a measure of educational inequality. In some cases children will be attending the school nearest to their home but in another education authority. The dataset does not include parents opting to send their children to a school outwith their designated catchment area yet within the same education authority. A greater influence on inequality is what happens within schools in Scotland (OECD 2007) e.g. setting and groupings which in all schools may be linked to postcode.
Andrew Conway says
Nor is it clear to me! That’s the point. Perhaps the pre-amble to this post (on the original blog) helps clarify my intention here
“This is the first in a series of posts looking at placing requests and what, if anything, they can tell us about how educational inequality varies across Scotland.”
There are many factors at play and I’m taking it step by step so this first post does not get as far as dealing with placing requests. In subsequent posts we’ll see if those factors can be separated out and if anything useful can be learned about how variations in regional inequality may affect education.
I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from teachers and parents which motivated me to look at this. To give just one example, there’s a school in a deprived area where there’s a concern that it’s losing its more able pupils because parents are sending them to a nearby school in the adjacent council’s area. As interaction between pupils is important in classroom learning, then this is to the disadvantage of remaining pupils in that school and advantageous to the other school. And if this can be supported beyond the anecdotal with quantified evidence, then it points to further questions, such as why are parents of more able pupils likely to make placing requests?
And the fundamental point, which goes even further beyond the limited scope of what I’m looking at here, is whether any teaching initiatives can close attainment gaps when inequalities are more deeply rooted in society.
florian albert says
As David Watt points out, there is another form of placing request which is equally important in some parts of Scotland; placing requests within a local authority.
The Edinburgh Evening News used to publish details of placing requests for the city’s primary schools.
This showed that some primaries had large number of ‘requests in’; Davidson’s Mains, 39 (15 granted), Flora Stevenson, 34 (12 granted), Royal High 34 (21 granted) and Sciennes 30 (11 granted). From these four schools alone, there were 76 failed placing requests.
The figures also showed that in a considerable number of primaries fewer that half the pupils in the notional catchment area attended their local school; in 2008, there were 23 such state primaries in Edinburgh. 9 had under 35% of pupils in their catchment area attending the school.
I believe that Edinburgh Council stopped publishing details such as those above several years ago.
Andrew Conway says
Yes, there are very interesting patterns here too. I know of two primaries that are close to each other where one is full and rejecting many placing requests but the other is undersubscribed. As far as I can tell it is a popular perception by parents that one is better than the other but I’m not sure there is any basis for it.
A difficulty is that the Scottish government stopped collating and publishing placing requests as a national statistic publication in 2010. I asked them why and was pointed to this
https://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/School-Education/scotstat/PastCons
I also asked how we may now get such data and it seems the only way is to ask each local authority individually.
florian albert says
It seems obvious to me that the reason councils and the Scottish government do not collate and publish information is that it would draw attention to the fact that many parents are unhappy with the school in whose catchment area they live.
In my experience, teachers are amongst those most eager to ensure that their child/children get to a good school – or, to be brutally honest, avoid a bad school.