Conference Program

Socio-economic segregation in UK schools has primarily been explored through analysing Free School Meals (FSM) as a marker of deprivation. We seek to explore the ‘secret garden’ of UK school segregation research, providing three new insights to understanding social segregation in UK schools. Firstly, we analyse social class segregation moving beyond a binary measure of socio-economic inequality. Secondly, we include private schools - a major source of inequality within British schooling, often omitted due to missing data. Finally, we use administrative data to undertake pan-UK analysis with a greater degree of geographical and school type detail than has previously been 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 3269 post-16 institutions across the UK. We apply the multigroup Mutual Information Index (M) and its normalised variants (H, LS) to quantify segregation at four geographic scales: home nation, English region, local authority and individual school. At a UK-wide scale segregation decreases by 22% if we exclude private schools and we find substantial geographical variation with private schools having a larger effect on school segregation in cities, particularly London. Fixed effects models for England reveal that private or selective school status and high local FSM prevalence each increase a school’s local segregation score, and these effects intensify in more disadvantaged local authorities. The findings demonstrate that private schooling amplifies class-based segregation beyond what FSM-based analyses capture.