Who am I?

  • Professor of Urban Analytics @ CASA, UCL
    • Data, Urban Policy, Quantitative Methods, Maps
  • Former State Secondary School Geography Teacher
  • Brighton Resident and Parent
  • Lifelong Labour voter and former party member

Why are we all here?

  • I made you come
  • An awareness of controversial changes to secondary admissions in the city over the last 2-years
  • An interest in schools and educational attainment more generally
  • An interest in supporting disadvantaged students to achieve
  • An interest in data and evidence-based policy making
  • You’ve read my report and want to ask some questions
    • Or took one look at the length of it and thought it easier to hear me talk about it
  • A good opportunity to throw something at me

First — today’s response from Class Divide

Class Divide have published a thoughtful response to this report today. I am grateful for it — they have spent six years working on exactly the barriers this talk is about, and we share the same goal.

  • We agree on far more than we differ on:
    • Poverty is foundational — the attainment gap has many tangled causes
    • Absence matters enormously — and much of it is poverty: bus fares, unmet special educational needs, ill health
    • Outcomes for our poorest children — in Whitehawk especially — are not good enough

Where we differ — and it is narrow

  • My question is deliberately narrow: in a city already among the most integrated in England, does moving children between schools deliver enough attainment gain to justify the certain cost to the children who move?
  • The disruption is certain, and now; the benefit is uncertain - looking at the data helps us reduce that uncertainty. The burden of proof sits with the intervention.
  • And it is not “almost no cost”: moving children further afield lengthens daily journeys — and longer journeys mean more absence (my own report shows this), borne hardest by the poorest. That is the very lever we all agree matters most.
  • Absence (which I will talk about a lot) is not an “unfixable excuse” - if all schools in the city had the same absence levels as the city’s best, it would make a huge dent in the disadvantage attainment gap.
  • This is, in the end, partly a question of values as well as evidence - but this talk is concerned principally with the evidence.

The Report