The association between primary free schools and social segregation was relating to ethnicity, in that pupils in some areas were less likely to meet peers from other ethnic backgrounds at school than before the primary free school opened.
In the report, The Free Schools Experiment; Analysing the impacts of English free schools on neighbouring schools, published on UCL Discovery and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the researchers investigated the impact that government-funded free schools had on their neighbouring schools.
Free schools, which were introduced in 2010, were intended to be high-quality alternatives, offering parents better choice and increasing attainment by boosting competition between local schools, driving up performance.
The study found the presence of a free school was not associated with any significant change in student attainment in neighbouring primary schools.
In neighbouring secondary schools, there was on average a modest increase in student attainment in English and Maths after a free school opened. There was also evidence to suggest increased attainment was associated to some extent with how successful neighbouring secondary schools were in attracting advantaged students, including those with higher prior attainment, as neighbouring secondary schools admitting a substantially more disadvantaged intake after a free school opened did not tend to improve.
The researchers found free schools were not necessarily ‘high-quality’ during the period analysed. Primary free schools performed worse than a matched sample of similar schools, while secondary free schools performed no better or worse than similar schools.
Free schools did affect student enrolment in neighbouring schools. Primary schools near a free school experienced a decline in Reception year student numbers, averaging 2.5% across four of the six years analysed. Secondary schools experienced a slightly larger and more consistent decline of 4.5% in Year 7 entry on average across the six years.
Nearly two-thirds of neighbouring school leaders who responded to the project’s survey reported being in competition with their nearest free school, including over student recruitment and popularity among parents. The highest levels of perceived competition were where free schools were seen by their neighbours to appeal to aspirational or middle-class families, by promoting a fast-paced academic or quasi-private school ethos and by counselling out children who might be harder to provide for.
Perceived competition was associated with neighbouring schools carrying out new marketing and promotional activities and, to a slightly lesser extent, placing more emphasis on core curriculum subjects, student attainment in exams and Ofsted grades. There was no evidence that perceived competition spurred neighbouring schools to act to directly enhance the quality of their teaching and learning.
Lead author Dr Rob Higham (IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education & Society) said: “Our findings show that the introduction of free schools has often created new competition, but this competition has related particularly to recruitment from a finite pool of students as well as to students’ socio-economic status, rather than directly to teaching quality and classroom practices. When subjected to these new market pressures, neighbouring schools rarely prioritised change or innovation in classroom practices.”
A key policy claim was that free schools would push existing schools to find ways to improve student attainment. The findings show a modest increase in attainment in neighbouring secondary, but not primary, schools. In a hypothetical school market of 100 schools, a secondary school with a nearby free school would move up between one or two positions in the league table each year over a four-year period.
The researchers found evidence to suggest that this estimated improvement was somewhat associated with a secondary school’s ability to recruit students better positioned to perform well. There was improvement among secondary neighbouring schools that experienced, after a free school opened, an influx of students who had high prior attainment and were either not eligible for free school meals or were not White British. These schools already served more advantaged intakes prior to a free school opening.
The researchers found that neighbouring schools were more likely to become destabilised if they served a deprived neighbourhood, lost students due to a free school, and were downgraded to below ‘Good’ by Ofsted just before or after a free school opened. This had the potential to start a cycle of decline, by negatively influencing parental choice, further concentrating disadvantaged students into these neighbouring schools and creating the need for cuts to staffing and curriculum, because state funding is closely linked to student numbers. This was clearest in primary schools, with primary free schools often seen to be exacerbating a growing demographic decline in primary pupil numbers.
Free school enrolment was also associated with increased social segregation in the primary phase on average. While the trend in England has been toward decreasing segregation, areas in which primary free schools opened saw an opposite trend with modest increases in segregation for students speaking English as an additional language, Black, Asian and ethnic minority students, and White British students.
The researchers attribute this increased social segregation to competition between schools and to different ways in which some free schools have created new options for parents to choose schools that are more homogenous than their local area, including both “self-segregation” by minority ethnic parents and perceived “white flight”.
Dr Higham said: “Free schools were intended to be beacons of good practice, encouraging neighbouring schools to perform better. Our findings, however, evidence selective competition where schools have faced stronger incentives to compete over the socio-economic characteristics of students. Not all free schools create such choice and competition, but where they do, this has the potential to increase social divisions in the school system, including the social segregation of students.”
