In hard times, young people face two hurdles to finding work.  First, firms tend to hold onto their existing experienced staff but stop recruitment to reduce their workforce. This collapse in new vacancies hits young people hardest. Second, with more unemployment comes more choice of potential employees for firms who are hiring. Firms favour previous experience placing young people in a catch 22 situation of not being able to get the experience they need to get work because they can’t get the work in the first place. For the least educated or those who are unlucky enough to experience long periods out of work now, it is increasingly hard to get that break that opens the door to the labour market.

As the number of youths who are out of work continues to rise the exchequer is left counting the cost. Each 16-17 year old in receipt of benefits costs an average of £3,660 a year whilst each unemployed 18-24 year old who claims costs an average of £5,600 a year. Even though many young people don’t claim benefits, just 19% of 16-17 year olds not in education or employment and 65% of 18-24 year olds with the sheer number of young people out of work, plus the additional tax and NI revenue lost through the lack of earnings, the numbers are non-negligible. In total, the current cost of youth unemployment to the exchequer is £5.3 billion per year. The productivity loss to the economy, often calculated as the wage foregone to measure the output lost, is £10.7 billion. The large numbers not claiming benefits and the low value of benefits relative to potential earnings makes an important point that work incentives are very strong for this group.

On top of these current costs, there are also long-term scars to youth unemployment in the form of future unemployment spells and lower wages. We can see from previous generations’ experiences of youth unemployment that the longer the period spent out of work in youth, the more time spent out of work later in life and the lower potential wages were when in work. This evidence on the future costs of youth unemployment comes from two UK birth cohorts that track all babies born in a window for the rest of their lives. By chance, the participants in the first cohort were aged 21 when the 1980s recession hit and in the second cohort, the participants were aged 20 when the 1990s recession hit. Around one in five young people in the first cohort spent over 6 months out of work before age 23, and it was similar in the second. Furthermore these people spent about 20% of their time unemployed 5 years later and 15% even 12 years later.

For males in the second birth cohort, an extra month out of work before age 25 raised the proportion of time out of work between age 26 and 30 by three quarter of a per cent; an extra year out of work in youth led to 10 months more unemployment later in life. It is a very similar story for wages with an extra month unemployed when young associated with 1% lower wages in their early thirties. It’s possible that these legacies may not reflect just the pure effect of youth unemployment but also that those experiencing more unemployment are less well educated and come from deprived backgrounds. The great advantage of the birth cohort studies is that so much is known about the young person’s childhood from their education to their attitudes and beliefs, their health, their wider circumstances and almost as much is known about their parents.  The evidence suggests that about half of the later lower wages and higher unemployment exposure stems from these background differences between people and about half is a result of the unemployment itself.

The cost to the individual’s future is therefore large. However, it doesn’t end there. There is also a future cost to the public purse in terms of future benefit claims and tax revenues lost from lower earnings as a result of this scarring. Estimates from the second birth cohort suggest that the average unemployed young man will cost the exchequer a further £2,900 in future costs with the average unemployed young woman costing £2,300 a year. Aggregating these up in the context of the current youth unemployment crisis leads to further future costs to the exchequer of £2.9 billion. The future productivity losses in terms of output lost are estimated to be £6.7 billion. If we add the exchequer costs together to give the combined future and current costs of youth unemployment (discounted to adjust future costs to be equivalent to today’s) the total cost to the exchequer is therefore £28 billion. These numbers suggest that doing nothing about youth unemployment is and will continue to cost us dear.

Tomorrow the new school league tables are published, with the usual blitz of interest in the rise and fall of individual schools. The arguments for and against the publication of these tables are now so familiar as to excite little interest.

But this year there is a significant change in the content of the tables.  For the first time, GCSE results for each school will be reported for groups of pupils within the school, groups defined by their Keystage 2 (KS2) scores. Specifically, for each school the tables will report the percentage of pupils attaining at least 5 A* – C grades (including English and maths) separately for low-attaining pupils, high attaining pupils and a middle group.  This change has potentially far-reaching implications, which we describe below.

This is a change for the better, one that we have proposed and supported elsewhere.  Why? We believe that in order to support parents choosing a school, league tables need to be functional, relevant and comprehensible. The last of these is straightforward (though not all league table measures in the past have been comprehensible: Contextualised Value-Added (CVA) being the perfect example). ‘Relevant’ means that a measure has some relevance to the family’s specific child. A simple school average, such as the standard whole-cohort % 5 A* to C, is not very informative about how one specific pupil is likely to get on there. By ‘functional’ we mean a measure that does actually help a family to predict the likely GCSE attainment of their child in different schools. If a measure is not functional it should not be published at all.

The new group-specific component is comprehensible and is more relevant than the whole-cohort %5 A* to C measure.  In our analysis of functionality, we show that it is as good as the standard measure, and much better than CVA.

It also addresses in a very straightforward way the critique of the standard league tables that they simply reflect the ability of the intake into schools, and not the effectiveness of the school.  By reporting the attainment of specific groups of students of given ability, this measure automatically corrects for prior attainment, and in a very transparent way. This is therefore much more informative to parents about the likely outcome for their own children than a simple average.  This of course is what value-added measures are meant to do, but they have never really become popular, and as we show they are not very functional.

However, the details of the new measure now published are problematic in one way. The choice of groups is important. We defined groups by quite narrow ten percentile bands, the low attaining group lying between the 20^th and 30^th percentiles in the KS2 distribution, the high attaining group between the 70^th and 80^th percentiles, and the middle group between the 45^th to 55^th percentiles. While clearly there is still variation in student ability within each band, it is second order and the main differences between schools in performance for any group will come from variation in schools’ teaching effectiveness.

However, the DfE has chosen much broader bands, and have defined the groups so that they cover the entire pupil population: the low attaining group are students below the expected level (Level 4) in the KS2 tests; the middle attaining are those at the expected level, and the high attaining group comprises students above the expected level.

This has one significant disadvantage, set out in detail by Rebecca Allen here. The middle group contains around 45% of all pupils, and so there is very significant variation in average ability within that group across schools. This in turn means that differences in league table performance between schools will reflect differences in intake as well as effectiveness, even within the group, thus partly undermining the aim of group-specific reports.

The chart below illustrates this for the middle attainment group (see here for more details).  Each of the three thousand or so tiny blue dots shows the capped GCSE attainment for a group of mid-attaining pupils (on the DfE’s measure of achieving at the expected level at KS2) against the average KS2 score (i.e. prior attainment) of pupils at the school. The red dots plot the same relationship for our narrow group of middle attainers (the 45^th to the 55^th percentile). The chart shows very clearly that the performance among our narrow band is essentially unrelated to prior attainment, but the DfE measure for the very broad group does still favour schools with higher prior ability pupils.

We can speculate as to why the DfE chose to have much broader groups. There may be statistical reasons, pragmatic reasons or what can be termed “look and feel” reasons. Using narrow KS2 bands will correctly identify the effectiveness of the school, but will almost always be averaging over a small number of students. So the estimates will tend to be “noisy”, and induce more variation from year to year than averaging over bigger groups. The trade-off here is then between a noisy measure of something very useful against a more stable measure of something less useful. Our original measure was intended to balance these, the DfE have gone all the way to the latter.

A pragmatic reason is that some schools may not have any pupils in a particular narrow percentile band of the KS2 distribution. The narrower the band the more likely this is to be true. This would mean either null entries in the league tables, which might be confusing, or some complex statistical imputation procedure, which might be more confusing. The broad groups that cover the entire pupil population are likely to have very few null entries. Finally, the broad groups feel more ‘inclusive’, they report the performance of all of a school’s students. This is a red herring – the point of the tables is to inform parents in choosing a school, not to generate warm glows.

The new measures hold out the promise of improvements in two areas: choices by parents and behaviour by schools. Parents will have better information on the likely academic attainment of their child in a range of schools. Second, parents will be able to see more directly whether school choice actually matters a great deal for them: whether there are worthwhile differences in attainment within the ability group of their child.

The key point for schools is that performance measures have consequences for behaviour. If this new measure is widely used, it will give schools more of an incentive to focus across the ability distribution. It is still the %5 A* – C measure that is the focus of attention for each group, but now schools will have to pay attention to improving this metric for high and low ability groups as well as simply the marginal children with the highest chance of getting that crucial fifth C grade.

If one believes that gaming and focussing of resources within schools is a very big deal (and there is little quantitative evidence either way) then the new measures could have a major impact on such behaviour. Even if such resource focussing is second order, performance measures send signals on what is valued. These new league table measures will explicitly draw widespread media and public attention to the performance of low- and high-ability children in every school in England.

Two articles in the Times Education Supplement (TES) last Friday nicely illustrate the debate on school choice and school competition.

The first reports results from the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS), citing research by Sonia Exley, at the LSE, showing that most respondents thought that school choice was not a priority.

A familiar refrain in the school choice debate is that “all we want is a good local school”. There should be little doubt that this is indeed what most parents do want. We have used data from the Millennium Cohort Study to estimate the relative weights that parents place on the characteristics of primary schools. Unsurprisingly, school academic quality is positively valued, and distance between home and school is highly negatively valued. This makes a lot of sense: many parents have to make this journey four times a day. So, yes, people, do want a good local school.

But where does this take us? It is often said to imply that school choice is a distraction, an irrelevance. There is a side issue of whether choice is a good thing per se, as opposed to being functionally good. This is the thrust of the point above, that choice itself was not a priority, though the study also reports that 68% agreed that parents should have a basic right to choose their child’s school. Choice per se may become valuable once contrasted with the alternative of no choice.

But the main issue should be whether using school choice is a better way to allocate children to schools than alternatives. One alternative is implicit in the statement – children should go to their local school. In fact this gets a lot of support in the survey: the TES reports that 85% of respondents in the BSAS believe parents “should send their children to their local school”.

This idea would work well if families were not permitted to move house after the school admissions rule was changed. It is surely obvious why. We know that parents care a great deal about the school their child goes to. If the school allocation rule was simply “you will attend your local school”, then parents who were able to would ensure that their local school was the one they wanted by moving house.

It is quite possible that this would in fact lead to no less social segregation in schools, and almost certainly greater social segregation by neighbourhoods. While we found the relationship between school quality and moving house to be weaker than many might expect, this would undoubtedly be stronger in a world where your residence determined your school. It also does not do away with the concern about having to actually exercise a choice – it simply transfers it to a choice of neighbourhood and school combined.

So neighbourhood-based schooling would be very unlikely to resolve the issues of social segregation and choice-angst associated with choice-based schooling. It would also hand each school a local monopoly and, in the case of poorer families at least, a captive audience with no escape.

This connects to the second TES article, a leader on school competition. As the article notes, “Few things exercise critics of education policy more than the spectre of increased competition in our school system.” The argument balances the “un-school”-like, unorganised, chaotic and generally messy nature of competition with the potential for this to improve outcomes for students.

In fact, there is some evidence on this trade-off and what the net result of competition is (the article is mostly about competition for 6^th form entrants and allegations of mis-information, but the available evidence is about compulsory schooling).  While the international evidence is mixed, the UK evidence suggests that there is at the very best a weak and small positive effect of competition on student outcomes; a review is here. The interesting question is why competition doesn’t appear to do much. The answer appears to lie in market failures in the schools market. If these could be addressed, it may be that a competitive threat might do more to raise standards in poorly performing schools.

Much of the furore about school ‘choice’ or ‘competition’ is misplaced. It is not choice between schools per se, relative to other allocation rules, that causes the perceived unfairness. The focus for objections should be the way that places in over-subscribed schools are allocated. The proximity criterion – who lives closest gets in – is operated in almost every non-selective school. This directly relates the chances of getting in to the most popular schools to family income, damaging social mobility in a very clear way. If some or all places at an over-subscribed school were filled by a random ballot, then school choice would seem a very different beast.

Finally, the competition article talks of ruined lives: “If no authority oversees admissions, plots likely pupil numbers or configures special needs support, the results won’t just be missed targets or dicey operating margins, but ruined, real pupil lives.” It is also true that that poor communities trapped with low-performing schools ruins lives, that unaccountable and coasting schools also ruin lives. The debate is about how best to avoid ruined lives, not whether or not they should be ruined.

Recent news has drawn attention to a likely increase in the use of payday loans – short-term loans at staggeringly high rates of interest – to cover temporary income shortfalls, giving an insight into how low income households manage their finances during the economic downturn.

Another possibility – discussed in a recent paper – is that low-income households might buy a National Lottery ticket. Rather than being irrational, as is usually thought, this might actually be a reasonable choice for people who are faced with “lumpy” spending needs – such as replacing a consumer durable or paying off debts – and who have no savings and no access to credit on reasonable terms.

The basic argument is that a Lottery ticket gives someone the opportunity to forego a small amount of nondurable spending for the chance of a sizeable lump sum that could make them a lot better off  – for example by allowing them to buy a replacement washing machine or television.

Is this what people actually do? Well, perhaps it is no coincidence that the National Lottery operator Camelot recently announced its “highest-ever interim” lottery sales.

Rather than looking at Lottery sales, however, the paper looks at the question in a different way and asks whether sales of durable goods are more responsive to Lottery wins than to similar-sized cash windfalls from other sources – which would be consistent with people buying Lottery tickets as a way of financing durable goods. To take care of general differences in the effect of Lottery winnings (such as feeling lucky), the research compares the difference in response across two types of people – those who should otherwise be able to draw on savings and/or other forms of credit and those who cannot.

The findings provide quite a bit of support for the argument that at least some people might use the Lottery as a way of financing lumpy spending. Focusing on windfalls of between £200 and £5,000, purchases of consumer durables (fridges, washing machines, televisions etc) are shown to be significantly more responsive more to a Lottery win than to other types of windfall – and only for those who would otherwise have few alternative options. This is precisely what you would expect to find if the Lottery was being used to finance such purchases (and it is hard to think of another explanation for this result).

So, while the current economic downturn may bring bad news for most, it may well continue to be a good time for Camelot.

We published some research last Friday showing that students perform less well in their crucial GCSE exams in years when there is a major international football tournament taking place at the same time. For example, the FIFA World Cup in the summer of 2010, or the UEFA European Championship next summer, both overlap in part with the GCSE exam timetable.

With the draw for the groups in the European Championship taking place earlier that day, much of the comment naturally and sensibly focussed on the specific issue of the impact of next year’s tournament on exam scores. This is important: we estimate that the concurrence of the exams and saturation media coverage of the football reduces exam scores on average by around 0.12 standard deviations of pupil performance and by a lot more for some groups who reduce their effort a lot. These groups tend to be from poorer areas and predominantly (but by no means exclusively) male students.  Since these groups are already lower-performing groups, this means that education gaps will widen. We think of this impact arising through a reduction in student effort, with that time being spent instead on watching the football tournament. The variation in impact arises because of differing tastes for football, arising in turn from cultural norms and idiosyncratic factors, and from the differential effectiveness of an hour of study on exam performance.

However, there is also a broader significance to the research: finding that effort matters matters.

Recent research by economists has broadened out from the previous focus on cognitive ability, and a great deal of work has investigated the role of non-cognitive factors in educational attainment. Non-cognitive factors can be identified with personality traits (see Heckman), and one of the ‘big 5’ personality traits is ‘conscientiousness’, with the related traits of self-control, accepting delayed gratification, and a strong work ethic. Conscientiousness has been shown to be an excellent predictor of educational attainment and course grades. These aspects of self control and ability to concentrate are clearly related to the broad notion of effort we are using here. Our results on the importance of effort strengthen this evidence by isolating the effect of decisions on effort and time allocation in addition to the general ability to concentrate and exert self-control.

There is a great deal of policy interest in England arising from recent studies of US Charter schools with what is called a “No Excuses” ethos. This includes the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) network of schools and schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone. These schools all feature a long school day, a longer school year, very selective teacher recruitment, strong norms of behaviour, as well as other characteristics. Some of the profession’s very top researchers have produced evidence showing that such schools produce very powerful positive effects on student achievement. While this overall effect could be due to different aspects of the KIPP/HCZ ethos, part of it is very likely to be increased effort from the students. Our results complement this by showing the impact of just a change in effort, and that that can have very substantial effects.

This matters for a number of reasons. First, unlike genetic characteristics, cognitive ability or non-cognitive traits, effort is almost immediately changeable. Our results suggest that this could have a big effect. The fact that we find changes in student effort to be very potent in affecting test scores suggests that policy levers to raise effort through incentives or changing school ethos are worth considering seriously. Such interventions would be justified if the low effort resulted from market failures due to lack of information on the returns to schooling, or time-inconsistent discounting.  Second, the importance of a manipulable factor such as effort for adolescents’ educational performance provides evidence of potentially high value policy interventions much later than “early years” policies. This is encouraging, offering some hope that low performing students’ trajectories in life can perhaps be effectively improved even after a difficult environment early in life.

In a recent surprise announcement to the House of Commons the Chancellor announced that he wants to scrap national pay deals for public sector workers. Labour unions across the land are hitting back, arguing that this will damage public services. In fact, the evidence we have on the effect of national pay regulation suggests exactly the opposite.

National pay awards tend to overpay public sector workers in low cost areas of the country and underpay those in high cost areas. Recent research shows the size of these differentials. For example, the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that women working in the public sector in the West Midlands are paid upto 14  percent more than their private sector counterparts. What has received much less attention is that these pay differentials may have an important impact on the quality of public services provided in different parts of the country.

National pay arrangements effective impose a pay ceiling for workers in high cost areas. Simple economics suggests this should impact on the ability of the public sector to deliver services in these areas. The lower wages offered to public sector workers relative to their private sector counterparts in high cost areas will mean, all other things equal, that the public sector will struggle to recruit and retain the best quality workers. This in turn will mean problems in producing services.

Recent work undertaken at the CMPO and the London School of Economics confirms this intuition in a very stark setting. Analysis of the impact of national pay regulation of the wages of over half a million nurses in the NHS showed that hospitals in high wage areas had higher death rates for patients who were admitted following a heart attack.  Furthermore, the output of hospitals in low cost areas such as the North East did not appear to compensate for the lower quality output of their counterparts in the high cost South East. Our research suggested that deregulating pay to reduce the gap between nurses pay and that of their counterparts in the private sector would both save lives and cut costs. So in this case both economic intuition and the Chancellor’s instincts are right: deregulating public sector wages will improve the quality of public services.

Further details of the research can be found at: Propper, C and Van Reenen J (2010). Can Pay Regulation Kill? Panel Data Evidence on the Effects of Labour Markets on Hospital Performance. Journal of Political Economy 118 (2): 222-273.

This Saturday’s Financial Times^[1] ran a column under the headline “Charity begins with a brand” (although I note that the online edition of the newspaper contains the more equivocal “can”). Title notwithstanding, the tone of the article is encouraging to the branding of charities, specifically when it comes to applying for companies’ CSR budgets, although the phenomenon is hardly limited in this way, with branding increasingly a common part of charities’ functions.

This may, as the column suggests, be the result of the rise of entrepreneurial individuals within charities (or at the helm of smaller operations) – as the author, Mike Southon, writes “Twenty years ago, the main ambition of university students was to secure a lucrative job in a merchant bank, Today, the social conscience of young people seems much better defined”. Although a straw poll of my students suggests that the desire to work for a merchant bank remains alive and well, there is no doubt that many charities are trying to learn from the tools used by private sector companies to sell their wares. Is this an unambiguously good thing, however?

There is no doubt that advertising and branding are powerful tools, but it isn’t clear with whom charities are competing. Research by the CMPO^[2] and Cass Business School finds that giving as a portion of spending has been fairly constant since at least the late 1970s, despite a number of policies designed to increase it, and that charities are increasingly dependent on a shrinking pool of donors.

If the rise of ‘professionalism’ within fundraising, as well as a number of government policies to increase giving, have had little effect on overall giving levels, perhaps charities are not competing with private firms for donations but with each-other (we cannot observe the counterfactual world without these changes, and so cannot say for certain that giving would not have been far lower than it is without them, however). If this is true, branding may be good for some charities but bad for others. With the money spent on branding, it essentially boils down to a negative sum game.

It is possible however that the charitable giving sector is a natural monopoly and that charities enjoy considerable economies of scale, as we might easily imagine for the distribution of mosquito nets – if this is the case then the game need not be negative sum as well branded charities will increase in size and benefit from reduced costs, making the entire sector more efficient. It is also possible that professional branding and advertising make workers in an organisation more productive, and that output will rise sufficiently to compensate, even if significant redistributions of donations between charities do not occur.

It is equally plausible, however, that charities have committed themselves to a race to the top in their branding, spending ever more money to compete over a pot whose size does not change.

Neither of these are impossible, and there is not currently enough evidence to support either conclusion – until there is, the effect of branding and entrepreneurship on the fundraising side of charitable giving will remain ambiguous.

Chris Grayling, the Employment minister, firmly laid the blame for the rapid rise in unemployment in yesterday’s figures on the Euro-zone crisis. This argument is so obviously bogus, it is disappointing for a minister to be using this as a line of defence. However, the labour market figures are not as bleak as the headlines suggest. The effects of the Euro-zone crisis will hit us over the next six months, not the last, and the minister should have kept his powder dry as he’ll need this excuse in the coming months.

The argument presented is; the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which is the main data source on the labour market, showed a growth in employment until June, after which it appeared to go off a cliff with employment falling 190,000 in the three months leading up to September. The problems with this argument are threefold. First, the Euro-zone crisis broke in July and the performance of the UK economy since then has been the best in a year; a point made by the latest retail sales figures which show very healthy growth in September and October. So far rather than the Euro-zone crisis damaging growth we have been doing rather well. The danger lies in the future not the recent past. Second, employment and unemployment figures are driven by decisions made by firms, and it takes about three to four months for this to be seen in the data. For example, the latest data from September 2011 reflects the state of the economy in May-June rather than prior to the crisis. Finally, the LFS is only one of four data sources about the health of the labour market. Over the big sweep of boom and bust events, these track each other well, but on the specifics of timing there can be wobbles in any one of the series; looking at the set offers a better picture. In addition, the LFS have a survey of employment from employers, a survey of current vacancies and the count of all those claiming unemployment benefits. The last two offer the most up to date picture, but the LFS and employer survey are more comprehensive. All three indicators, other than the LFS, suggest that employment started to fall and unemployment started to rise in February or March this year. The claimant count bottomed out at 1.45 million in February and has risen every month since at a steady rate of 20,000 a month or so.  Vacancies currently offered by employers almost reached 500,000 in January before slipping back to 460,000 since May; a level consistent with low levels of net job losses. The employer’s survey only runs to June at the moment but says that employment peaked at 26.7 million in March and fell by 100,000 by June.

The LFS clearly looks like it mistimed the move back to job shedding by three months; this happens quite often but rarely matters much. The broader data clearly shows two things. First, that the labour market downturn precedes the Euro-crisis by some months and is totally in line with the downturn in UK economic growth, which started in November last year.  Second, that the employment shedding and unemployment rise has been pretty constant since March, rather than a recent collapse. Both of these stories are clearly at odds with the Euro story. But the rub is that the evidence suggests the latest sharp rise in unemployment in the LFS is a catch up from previously understating the rise. The labour market hasn’t, yet, gone off a cliff. Indeed the healthy growth and small rise in the claimant count may say things were improving a little as the Euro-crisis broke. So the overwhelming picture is that the current sharp rise in unemployment isn’t driven by the Euro-crisis but is also not as sharp as it first appears. The Euro-crisis excuse may well be needed, and be genuine, from March next year when the picture around January starts to emerge. But for the latest figures it is entirely bogus and also misses the deeper picture.

Recently the vice-chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference caught the media’s eye. He expressed concern about racial segregation in London schools, saying, “it can’t be a good thing for London to be sleepwalking towards Johannesburg.”

Those are headline-grabbing words but are they true? Do black or Asian pupils fill classrooms almost exclusively in some parts of the capital? The short answer is yes, they do. But, like most short answers, it is an over-simplification.

A new working paper published by CMPO today offers a new methodology for comparing differences in the ethnic compositions of locally competing secondary schools. It finds schools in London that in the academic year 2008-9 had a majority of their intake comprised by pupils of Black African heritage, some that were majority Black Caribbean, and others that were almost wholly Bangladeshi, or Indian.

Those concentrations reflect the residential geographies of where particular ethno-cultural groups live in London, with the geographies being shaped by historical and on-going processes of labour shortages, immigration, natural growth and suburbanisation (Finney & Simpson 2009: a highly recommended read). However, the differences between schools cannot solely be attributed to residential choices and subsequent constraints on which secondary schools the pupils attend because the paper uses an index of difference to compare schools that are recruiting pupils from one or more of the same primary schools. In this way it finds a secondary school that has thirty percentage points more Black African pupils than its average, locally competing school, a school that has thirty percentage points more Black Caribbean pupils, one that has forty points more Bangladeshi pupils, and another with sixty points more Indians.

So, there are differences between schools locally and some of those differences are quite stark. Nevertheless, we need to be wary of assuming the most extreme cases are representative of the norm. More commonly the differences do not veer too greatly from what would occur if all pupils simply attended the nearest secondary school to their primary. There is also little, if any, evidence to suggest the local differences between schools are growing, at least not when demographic changes are taken into consideration.

Of course, the debatable words are “too greatly”. For anyone who would aspire for schools either to represent the ethnic mix of their surrounding neighbourhoods or, even better, to ameliorate residential differences by being better mixed than neighbourhoods, any increase in the concentration of particular ethnic groups in particular schools will be a disappointment – a sentiment that is laudable. However, there are social justice arguments in favour of school choice and in not simply reproducing patterns of, for example, neighbourhood disadvantage by directing which school a pupil must necessarily attend. Choice, precisely because it is choice, can produce outcomes that some do not approve of but that are attractive, for whatever reasons, to those who make the choices. To deny them that choice, either directly or indirectly by overt criticism of their choices, raises issue of power as well as equality of opportunity.

There are three further reasons why the suggestion of ethnic segregation can be misleading. First, school allocations are not necessarily a matter of choice but of the overall matching of supply and demand for school places. Second, sorting by ethnicity may be confounded with sorting by income. In 2008, the Spearmen’s rank correlation between the proportion of pupils in a London secondary school of any of the Black African, Black Caribbean, Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani groups, with the proportion eligible for free school meals was r_S = 0.568 (p < 0.001). Third, research by the Runnymeade Trust has shown overall preferences among minority ethnic parents for their children to attend ethnically mixed schools (Weekes-Bernard 2007).

In summary, and taking the evidence in the round, whilst it is undoubtedly true to say that some but a few secondary schools in London contain a high proportion of a single ethnic group, the dynamic implied by the phrase “sleepwalking” is, as other studies have also discovered, unhelpful (Johnston et al. 2007).

Finney, N. & Simpson, L., 2009. “Sleepwalking to segregation”? Challenging myths about race and migration, Bristol: The Policy Press.

Johnston, R. et al., 2007. “Sleep-walking towards segregation?” The changing ethnic composition of English schools, 1997-2003: an entry cohort analysis. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(1), pp.73-90.

Weekes-Bernard, D., 2007. School Choice and Ethnic Segregation, London: The Runnymeade Trust.

The House of Lords is currently grappling with the proposed Coalition reforms to the NHS. But even as their Lordships debate, the new NHS Commissioning Board, which is at the heart of the government’s reforms in England, is due to start work. The Board will have a major role. It will take on the day-to-day running of the NHS, with a staff of around 3,500 and have overall responsibility for NHS care worth £80bn. It will also oversee the new clinical commissioning groups led by GPs and other clinicians who will “buy” care within the NHS, and organising the treatment of complicated conditions such as heart transplants.

The NHS is very good at delivering care within budget but it struggles to enact innovation and its productivity record is poor.  At the heart of the reform programme proposed by the Coalition is the belief that plurality in provision in the NHS will foster innovation and productivity. While the medical unions, broadly defined, have run an active campaign against plurality equating it with privatisation and an increase in inequalities,  plurality on the provider side is a model used by many health care systems, including France, Germany and the Netherlands, as the best way they know of for delivering health care. In addition, we know from studies of the rest of the economy that much innovation comes from new entry and the exit of poorly performing incumbents.

The actions of the clinical commissioning groups are central to whether change in the patterns of care provision in the NHS change or whether the current incumbents, dominated by the large acute hospitals, retain their grip on provision. And the actions of the Commsisioning Board are critical to whether this will happen or not. The Board could either encourage commissioners to break out of the traditional mould and encourage plurality and diversity or it could stifle it by being overbearing and over-prescriptive.

At present, Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the Board, seems very mildly interested in plurality. He has said that the Board will publish information about general practice, so that people can compare what their GP provides compared with others in the area and nationally and he has said that “We think this will be a very powerful mechanism for patients to make choices about which GPs they use.” But big deal: such choice and information has supposed to be available to health care users for at least the last 5 years. There is a danger that Nicholson and his colleagues think this is radical. If so, then any hope for plurality is dead, as the real issues that will have to be tackled – such as stopping supporting poor providers and actively allowing people to move away from them, are far larger than simply posting more data on the opening hours of GP surgeries.