The social segregation of school intakes has considerable significance for education policy makers because it impacts on a number of key policy objectives. It negatively affects the relative performance of national systems with highly differentiated and socially segregated systems performing less well (PISA/OECD 2003). Further, a child’s educational success is enhanced if they go to a school where the children are mostly from higher socio economic groups and decreased if the majority of children are from less affluent groups. In other words some children are gaining a better education directly at the expense of others. Instead of decreasing the gap in educational attainment between classes, and thereby aiding social mobility, segregation increases it (Coldron et al 2008; Lupton 2004; Thrupp 1999). Where segregation leads to a steep hierarchy of local schools and a polarised perception on the part of parents this makes it more difficult to maximise parental satisfaction with the outcome and to manage the allocation process efficiently and economically (Flatley et al 2001). In addition, segregation creates outstanding and failing schools highly correlated with the social class of the intakes which threatens the meritocratic legitimacy of schooling. Less often noted as a concern is the injustice of mal-recognition (Fraser 1997; Coldron 2005; Reay and Lucey 2000 and 2002; Reay 2007; Gewirtz 1998 and 2002) often associated with the admissions process and which is deeply harmful. This paper focuses on the multiple causes of the social segregation of school intakes and seeks to show how they inter-relate in the particular context of the English system. It draws on the most comprehensive and up to date study of admission arrangements to English secondary schools (Coldron et al 2008) and uses this case to identify mechanisms, in a critical realist sense, that generate segregated schooling. These are likely to include the array of incentives and disincentives for schools and parents introduced by marketing policies (Gewirtz et al 1995; Lauder et al 1999); the covert selection on the part of schools the incentive to which is not entirely reducible to the effects of the market; residential segregation which complements the marketisation of education; the differing habitus of social groups leading to different choices; material differences in resources and in social and educational capital; the deployment of status discourses and symbolic violence that functions to maintain distinctions and advantage. Identifying such mechanisms will facilitate comparison with other national contexts (Steinmetz G. 2004). Understanding these generative mechanisms will inform policy aimed at reducing segregation. In particular it will enable us to critique simplistic accounts of these matters which have some credibility in political and academic discourse – for example that working class families are less able to understand the admissions system and as a result of this incompetence fail to get their preferred schools; or that the problem is mainly a matter of disadvantaged parents being denied access to the scarce ‘good’ schools and that the solution is better policing and the improvement of ‘failing’ schools. The paper will show how the latter does not adequately take account of how intake contributes powerfully to construct the public perception of schools as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and why a more adequate account focuses on how the admission system contributes to segregated intakes. The paper will consider a number of policy options relating to the way they operate in the English context.

The main original resource is a comprehensive study of English secondary schools. This is analysed from a critical realist perspective in order to conceptualise generative mechanisms or theories about segregated intakes.

It is intended that the outcome will be a clearer conceptualisation and more nuanced differentiation of reasons and causes that will illuminate the practical issues facing education policy makers in many countries.