The early impact of Brighton and Hove's school admission reforms

Abstract

We analyse the initial impact of a major school admission reform in Brighton and Hove. The new system incorporated a lottery for oversubscribed places and new catchment areas. We examine the post-reform changes in school composition. We locate the major winners and losers in terms of the quality of school attended. We match similar cities and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of the policy change. We see no significant change in student sorting: if anything, the point estimates suggest a rise in socio-economic segregation. We do see a significant weakening of the dependence of school attended on student’s prior attainment.school lottery, segregation, school admissions reforms