Would Reducing Selection Increase Opportunity? A Response to Sam Freedman

The blogger and education policy specialist has made a timely intervention in the discussion about schools' role in addressing inequality. Could any of it work in practice?

Before it was replaced by existential despair about generative artificial intelligence, organised meetings between educators were almost always dominated by discussions of inequality. Responsible teachers and lecturers were rightly frustrated by the factors that tether students’ attainment in school to the affluence of their home.

Journalist and education policy wonk Sam Freedman has contributed an effective provocation to ongoing debates about the ‘achievement gap’ in England’s schools. Freedman’s argument, shared in his excellent Comment is Freed substack, can be boiled down to three essentials:

(i) education serves and always will serve a social stratification function, rationing access to certain kinds of opportunities through certain kinds of credentials;

(ii) this gives better-off parents an incentive (they already have the means and, in a liberal society, the opportunity) to invest in ensuring their children do well academically in school; therefore

(iii) the academic achievement gap is likely ineradicable. Government policy should shift to making the gap less socially and economically significant.

These points make uncomfortable reading for educators, though they are well-supported by research, including valuable recent work by the Education Policy Institute, ImpactEd and the and the Sutton Trust.

Reduce academic selection

Diagnosis broadly accepted, in this post I’m going to focus on just one of Freedman’s prescriptions for a fairer schooling system.¹ Freedman suggests making sixth forms less selective. His idea is that sixth forms should admit students on the basis of ‘a minimum standard required for doing A levels’. This would, he argues, broaden access to the type of opportunities that, ultimately, carry bigger pay checks or elevated social status.

This proposal is constructive, but not yet practical.² What would it take to make it both? First, we would need clarity on what we mean by “a minimum standard” for A level study, who should decide it, and why we need one. The third of these questions is the easiest to answer. We need a minimum standard so that adolescents aren’t embarking on courses for which they are unprepared and in which they have no reasonable chance of success. A minimum academic standard is also a fair standard of human decency.

Where should that standard be set? Most likely, Freeman is alluding to the sort of minimum entry criteria most schools require in order to consider an application of any type—typically a basket of good GCSEs including English and maths. This is a reasonable starting point, but no more. Many, if not most, sixth forms supplement their minimum entry requirements with subject-specific criteria. And almost one-in-five 16 to 19 year-olds studies a mix of A levels and other qualification, typically BTECs, T-levels, or other ‘vocational’ qualifications, that potentially have quite different entry requirements. Freedman’s proposal will require minimum standards at the subject level in order to be viable.

That’s a bigger ask that it might first appear. There is a widely-shared conviction among educators that GCSEs provide very different degrees of foundation for A level study. Exam results suggest that students achieving grades 7 at GCSE in English language, literature and the humanities (broadly defined) can do well in related A levels. The same is not true in STEM subjects, leading to the widespread practice of setting higher entry requirements for those subjects at A level. Cutting across the laudable aim of widening participation, the growth in A level uptake is almost entirely concentrated in those subjects with higher entry requirements.

This situation is compounded by yawning regional variation in pupils’ attainment at GCSE. Place has the single largest ‘effect size’, or impact, on a students’ likely achievement at age 18. London sixth forms, beneficiaries of the largest and best-educated group of students in the country, don’t have to choose between students’ suitability for specific courses and their own viability. Not so sixth forms elsewhere in the country. In practice, this means schools have very different entry requirements for A level study depending on where they are in the country.

I have yet to meet the Head of a high-performing London school or college who has not felt pressure from her or his Head of Maths to raise the entry requirement for Maths A level to a grade 9 at GCSE. (Further Maths, far harder, is often already there.) Most will compromise on a grade 8. Contrast that entry tariff with the proponderance of schools in the North East or South West of England, where average attainment is significantly lower, students are often admitted to Maths A level having achieved a 6, or even a 5, at GCSE, and to Further Maths courses one grade higher.

Who sets the standard?

If Freedman’s proposal is to have its intended effect, sixth forms could not be allowed to continue setting their own minimum entry standards. Discretion at this level would simply create structural stratification by school in places like London, Birmingham and Manchester that have large student populations. School-level decision-making would also likely result in students arbitraging grade entry requirements for in-demand courses more than is already the case—choosing to study Further Maths A level at the sixth form college with the lowest entry requirements, rather than for any other reason. Multi-academy trusts might tilt towards inclusion by operating sixth forms with different minimum entry requirements, but this still seems to fall short of Freedman’s goal.

An alternative locus of decision-making would for the Department for Education, or local councils, to take a direct role in setting minimum entry requirements for courses, independent of providers. Even allowing wide scope for expert input, this would almost inevitably further politicise the education system by drawing central or local government into decisions about students’ progression. Since no government could countenance a set of minimum entry requirements that would likely extinguish specific courses from some parts of the country, a likely near-term outcome would be a set of minimum entry requirements that were far too low to prove workable in urban centres and would likely consign more young people to inappropriate courses.

Central government has in the past couple of decades scrupulously avoided this sort of direct accountability for schooling outcomes. Were Whitehall to continue in this vein, one possibility would be to require Ofqual, or exam boards themselves—all at least nominally expert bodies—to publish recommended minimum entry requirements for each A level they accredit. I prefer this option to the dead hand of central government, but I can’t claim to be fully confident in its compatibility with student wellbeing.

Decision deferred

Reducing the role of academic selection in sixth form admissions might work for a ‘goldilocks’ school, one that receives just the right number of applications. These schools are about as common as flaxen-haired maidens whose social circle includes domesticated bears. In practice, some schools receive too few applicants, some far too many. The key to making the system work is providing oversubscribed schools with a fairer way of admitting students.

Freedman proposes the alternative mechanism of the lottery. I dislike the idea of admission by lottery at any stage of education. Partly, this is because it’s an open secret that some schools have used lotteries, banding and the like to engineer the student population they find most conducive. But partly, it’s because I think there are alternative admission systems that are both more progressive and easier to monitor.

Priority ranking, a form of contextual offer-making, is one such system.³ A school that admits students according to priority ranking commits to enrolling all applicants meeting a specific contextual criteria—say, eligibility for free school meals—before turning to any student not meeting that criteria. Combined with a commitment to admissions based only on minimum entry criteria, priority ranking might substantially increase the chances of poorer students being admitted to the best schools—a big step towards Freedman’s goal. However, priority ranking would still require a supplementary measure that allowed for ranking within priority groups.

The most practical such measure is straight-line distance from the school. This has the benefit of being (relatively) objective, but is a blunt tool with which to address educational inequality. The concentration of what in old money were considered Good and Outstanding schools in leafy suburbs means that distance-based admissions criteria tend to reinforce social stratification by house price. Some schools have responded to such concerns by locating their ‘nodal point’, the fixed location from which distances are measured, away from their physical school site. Given that house prices tend to respond relatively quickly to school improvement and oversubscription, a progressive admissions model would need to combine a distance measure with priority for under-resourced groups.

Risks and challenges

There are risks and challenges to reducing the role of academic selection in sixth form admissions. The most serious of these risks is to standards at age 16. Far from combating many schools’ fixation on exam results—fairly criticised in Alan Milburn’s recent work on youth unemployment—Freedman’s proposal risks scrolling back to the days of secondary schools focusing only on those ‘cliff edge’ grades that drove accountability standards. Why push for grade 9s when grade 6s will secure students’ onward progression to the sixth form of their choice? Many fellow educators will recoil at the very suggestion, but we should remember that this sort of behaviour is precisely what led to the last major revision to school accountability standards a decade ago. We need a policy-based solution to this incentive problem.

There are also challenges arising from the too varigated nature of our schools ecosystem. If we accept that forced ranking at age 16 is wrong, the same should apply at age 11. If national reference tests are to be the qualifying criteria for admissions to sixth form, the same should also hold for admissions to secondary school. For grammar schools, this means the practice of setting their own admissions tests, force ranking based on test scores, and probably interviewing prospective students, would all have to go, replaced, presumably, by a minimum CATS score above which they would be bound to make an offer.

This is likely to prove highly contentious. Grammar schools have proved to be possessed of a powerful lobby, effective in batting away even relatively cosmetic reforms—such changes to accountability measures that would have trimmed their progress scores while leaving their attainment untouched. Any government pursuing this agenda would need a strong stomach.⁴

There is also the incentive effect when it comes to parents. Freedman’s argument assumes that parents with means will continue to prioritise investment in their children’s education. Reducing the role of academic selection in the state schooling system might increase that incentive, leading to a modest revival of the fortunes of selective independent schools, at least in those parts of the country where the grammar system would have to be reformed.

As an aside, I definitely don’t accept Freedman’s point that universities should be given a free pass when it comes to admissions. British universities continue to receive variable, but almost always substantial public funding. Their operating model is premised on most students having access to public financing to pay fees and to support themselves. This seems like more than adequate justification for government policy to set guidelines for their admissions.

Is any of this very likely? Reform of the kind Freedman envisions would need to be system-wide and detail-oriented. Central government has a distinguished recent record in neither capacity. Any party of government intending to mount such a reform will rapidly confront interest groups made up of mostly middle class voters invested in the status quo. And education reform is, frustratingly, likely to rank far behind cost of living and immigration as policy priorities for at least the remainder of this Parliament.

This emphatically does not mean we should ignore Freedman’s provocation. Policy debates about inequality in education often resemble a learner driver attempting a three-point turn in a narrow cul de sac. At the very least, Freedman has encouraged us to consider reversing out of our current impasse.

1. It is, of course, unfair to assess one part of an argument in isolation from the rest of that argument. In many ways, I think the most important part of Freedman’s corrective is the observation that inquality is not a problem that can be tackled by the education system alone.

2. I am conscious that, as the serving Head of an academic sixth form school, there are many readers who will expect me to object in principle to this suggestion. I don’t. My school’s admissions arrangements are as much pragmatic as principled. The discussion at hand concerns system-wide reform.

3. I’ve previously written about the benefits of contextual school admissions as part of a series of actionable strategies for increasing equity in our schooling system.

4. The Labour Party likely has enough on its plate that it will not volunteer for this fight, while Reform UK is giddy over the prospects of increasing the level of selection by allowing more grammar schools.