Examining the precise nature of school intakes in terms of their social and economic characteristics is an important issue for research. The extent to which pupils with different background are, or are not, clustered together with others like them can reveal a great deal about a national school system (Gorard and See 2013). In England, the level of poverty, ethnicity, language and special needs segregation between schools is now monitored annually (Gorard 2015). This paper presents the findings from an ESRC-funded secondary data initiative project. The authors are currently looking at different ways of estimating disadvantage in schools in England based on existing datasets, creating new variables to encompass individual ‘trajectories’ of disadvantage, and applying these to analyses of school intakes and outcomes. For example, we take a variable such as whether a pupil is eligible for free schools meals (FSM) in any year (or whether data is missing), and collate this for every year the pupil was in compulsory schooling. The results can be used to create new variables, such as how many years a child has been FSM-eligible, for the individual and for those they go to school with. We do the same thing with other background variables such as living or going to school in a deprived area, having a special educational need (SEN), having English as an additional language (EAL), and even ethnic classification. We are also linking our new records to other datasets such as the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) to see how well our new trajectory variables match the richer data, such as parental occupation and income, in such smaller datasets. This chapter looks at improving measures of student poverty in education in order to see what light this casts on substantive issues, such as the purported underachievement of specific groups, schools and regions. It suggests that some policies are being misdirected, and that funding to improve results for poorer students is not being targeted efficiently.

Gorard, S. (2015) The complex determinants of school intake characteristics, England 1989 to 2014, Cambridge Journal of Education, 46 (1), 131-146. Gorard, S., Hordosy, R. and See, BH. (2013) Narrowing the determinants of segregation between schools 1996-2011, Journal of School Choice, 7 (2) 182-195.