Who are our schools for? Class Divide’s response to How to Pull the Right Lever

Tonight people in our city will be joining the launch of a new report, How to Pull the Right Lever, authored by Adam Dennett - Professor of Urban Analytics, in the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, city resident, parent and high profile opposer of the reforms to secondary school admissions policy passed by the city council in February 2025.

Dennett’s work makes a number of key arguments.

• After controlling for a range of factors, including poverty, secondary schools in Brighton and Hove are less socio-economically segregated and have better attainment than schools in most other areas of England.

• It is attendance - not socio-economic segregation - that drives low attainment for our poorest students in our city.

• The reforms themselves were, in the report’s words, “pulling a lever with relatively little mechanical advantage in the wrong direction”; policy made this way “risks doing more harm than good”; and Brighton and Hove should serve as a “cautionary tale” to any other place in the country considering pulling the school admissions lever to close attainment gaps between children in poverty and their more affluent counterparts.

What we agree with

The report states clearly that attendance matters.

We agree. It matters enormously. Nobody in this debate thinks otherwise, and it is unclear who is being argued against.

We have spent six years working on some of the reasons children in our community have higher levels of school absence. Practical things, not abstract ones. For our recent School Travel Report, a parent in Whitehawk told us families with the least money pay the most to travel: a £3.20 daily ticket from the driver, because a £453.90 annual pass is out of reach - nearly 40 per cent more over a year. One headteacher told us attendance at his school is lowest on Fridays. That is the day the money runs out.

We are still doing that work, and we will keep doing it. The council are also doing work to increase attendance, as are schools. Even the report’s own sources point this way: it cites research showing that “journey length and complexity are associated with higher absence rates” (p.49).

So the concern we have about this report and its conclusions is not a disagreement about whether attendance is important. It is a disagreement about what causes it, and about what a council can actually do.

One thing to be transparent about before we go on. We are a community group, not statisticians. So we asked some of the country’s leading education researchers to review the report. Their comments are included in this appendix, and they inform what follows.

Symptoms mistaken for causes

The issue is absence is not a separate lever sitting alongside disadvantage. It is one of the things disadvantage does. Unmet special educational needs drive absence, and unmet SEND is far more common among children from low-income families. As Professor Diane Reay of the University of Cambridge put it when she reviewed the report for us: “Poverty leads to non-attendance which then results in low attainment. If you don’t address the disadvantage which is actually driving the absences in schools like BACA and Longhill, attendance gains are likely to be minimal and temporary.”

The order of events matters, too. A cause cannot come after its effect. Poverty, ill health, special needs and the early clustering of poverty in schools all come before a child’s attainment at eleven. Indeed, attainment gaps are already evident when children start school. Treating that eleven-year-old’s test score as a cause, rather than as something already shaped by poverty, turns it into a proxy for the poverty you were trying to measure.

The report agrees with all of this, and says so. It describes absence and low prior attainment as “mediators sitting between deprivation and attainment outcomes” (p.26). It states plainly that deprivation often leads to higher unauthorised absence, and that absence then leads to lower grades. It even says - in its own words - that when absence enters the model, it “stole” a large chunk of the explanatory power from deprivation.

Having correctly identified absence and prior attainment as the routes by which poverty reaches a child’s GCSEs, the report then controls for both of them, and reports that what remains of poverty is smaller than commonly assumed.

But what remains after you have controlled for the ways poverty works is not the effect of poverty. It is the effect of poverty minus the ways poverty works.

Imagine investigating why people in damp housing get ill. You measure the damp, the mould and the cold. You control for mould and cold, and find that damp has almost no direct effect on anyone’s lungs. That is true. Damp does not reach into a person’s chest. It works by causing mould and cold. You would not conclude that fixing the damp was a low priority.

Prior attainment and absence are what poverty does.

The same pattern is visible in the workforce variables. The report treats teacher retention, leadership pay and teacher sickness as separate levers. But schools facing higher levels of disadvantage struggle more to recruit and keep teachers, and more demanding schools are harder places to work. These are not independent factors sitting alongside disadvantage. They are downstream of it. It all feeds into each other.

The two levers are one lever

This same logic applies to the report’s central comparison between admissions and attendance.

The report finds that its segregation measure is not statistically significant, and explains why in its own terms: any harm segregation causes is “already fully mediated by the variables already included in the model”. It then names the pathway. Segregation, it suggests, “could lead to higher absence (perhaps due to peer effects)” (p.27).

Read that again. The report’s own analysis says segregation may harm children by causing them to miss school.

Its conclusion is that we should therefore address the missing school rather than the segregation. This is like discovering that damp is caused by a hole in the roof and deciding to buy more dehumidifiers.

The report’s whole argument depends on absence and admissions being rival levers. Pull one or the other. Its own model suggests they may be the same lever, at different points in the chain.

But the opposite conclusion can be drawn. Research by Professor Stephen Gorard has consistently found a strong link between how segregated an area’s schools are and the size of its poverty attainment gap. Brighton and Hove has comparatively low segregation and a comparatively small gap. That is his theory working. So instead of seeing this city as a cautionary tale, it is, as Gorard himself puts it, “perhaps a reminder to other authorities to act in the ways that Brighton and Hove has tried to do for decades”.

It should also give us confidence that the additional social mixing triggered by the recent reform will have the intended outcome - to further reduce the poverty attainment gap. If anything the report’s conclusions should give us the confidence to do more - something we hope all political parties in the city note.

School “works” for poor children in Brighton and Hove

This report says Brighton and Hove is one of the best performing local authorities in England for disadvantaged children. Seventh best, once you account for the circumstances.

We know schools in our city work incredibly hard, often in very difficult circumstances, to do the best for all of their pupils - including those forced to live in poverty. We also know that some individual children eligible for FSM have a good experience of school and do well academically. Indeed, in recent years Class Divide members have celebrated positive educational outcomes and experiences for their children and for the children of their family, friends and neighbours.

When you take a community perspective, however, the picture looks very different.

The data shows that for at least the last fifteen years, only around three in ten young people in our part of Brighton and Hove (Whitehawk) have left school with a basic standard of education - previously understood as 5 GCSE passes including English and maths and now grade 4-9 GCSE in English and maths.

In addition, our children have been - and continue to be - suspended more, excluded more, and absent more than children elsewhere in this city.

Class Divide members - like the vast majority of parents - want their children to do well at school but their lived experience tells them that schools can lack aspiration and ambition for children, particularly children from low-income and working class families.

We would ask anyone reading this report to hold those two things in their head at the same time, and then decide which one they would want to explain to a parent in Whitehawk.

To believe that the school system is working well for all of our poorest children is a belief that might comfort those who want nothing to change, or who want to cast doubt on the direction of travel that recent reforms have taken - but it’s not a belief Class Divide members can afford to share.

If attendance is the lever, what do we pull, and when?

What would it actually mean to follow the report’s recommendation?

The report’s own analysis finds that most school-level absence is “dominated by intake and place-level structural factors”, and that the portion schools can actually control is “the smaller share” (p.31). It suggests that absence may be “a fundamentally harder problem to solve than admissions policies - more diffuse in its causes, more resistant to top-down policy intervention” (p.47). Its recommendation to this council is to commission a study.

Much of what it gestures towards is already underway through the city’s inequality review - which Class Divide campaigned for - and ignores all the work currently being undertaken by the local authority and schools every day.

Admissions arrangements, by contrast, are rules. The council writes them. They can be changed in a single cycle and the effect arrives the following September. This is precisely why de-clustering schools by poverty is one of the few things in this field that can actually be done now, in a landscape where nearly everything else takes a generation.

A report that identifies a mostly structural problem, calls for a study into its causes, and criticises this council for having acted on the one thing within its gift, is not offering an alternative.

It is offering a delay, and could be interpreted as seeking to undermine reforms that have been adopted through legitimate democratic means and scrutinised by the national schools adjudicator. We think both should be of concern to local decision makers and anyone who cares about inequality.

A perception problem, or an inequity in the rules?

The report describes the city’s catchment configuration. It shows which catchments have two schools and which have one.

It also discusses the demand for school choice in the east of the city. But it treats that demand as a perception problem: parents misreading the quality of their local school, who - with better data - “might have made a different decision”. What it does not treat it as is an inequity in the rules.

Up until recent policy changes, families in Whitehawk, Moulsecoomb, Portslade and the east of the city had one school in their catchment, while families in the centre had a choice of two. The one-school catchments are disproportionately the poorest parts of Brighton and Hove. The catchment system prior to reform kept the most sought-after schools within easy reach of the wealthier, central parts of the city, and out of reach of families in the east - and to a lesser extent still does.

This is what the admissions changes were about. An inequity in the rules. Some parents in this city had a choice of two schools. Some had a choice of one. Better data about the school you have been allocated is not the same thing as a fair chance of choosing it. This is a moral and ethical issue that - as recent reforms have shown - can and should be addressed through the political process. It is not a data problem.

Whatever the modelling says about what happens afterwards, that was not fair, and it was within the council’s power to fix.

The starkest way of putting it

The report finds that disadvantaged pupils do slightly better in schools with higher concentrations of other disadvantaged pupils - “provided they attend school”. It is careful to say that it does not advocate concentrating disadvantaged children in this way, and we take that at face value. But that finding is now in public circulation, and others will be less careful with it. So it is worth being clear about the principle.

If we were discussing students with any other protected characteristic, nobody would stand up and defend the argument that they do better when they are concentrated together in their own school - people would, quite rightly, identify this as discrimination.

What makes it acceptable to say about working class children?

We believe that how to make Brighton and Hove the best place to go to school if you are a child from a poor or working class background is not a technical question to be settled by better data. It is a political and ethical issue and includes questions about how places are allocated fairly, and about who schools are for.

Every school in this city should be a safe and welcoming place for every child, including the children forced to live in poverty.

That is not a modelling question. It is a question about who we are. And speaking directly to those in power, it’s a question about who you are.

Presuming failure

People living in the communities in the east of Brighton and Hove are very familiar with others presuming the things they are involved in - or the lives they live - will inevitably fail. And that this attitude is often - unfortunately - found in people who have more power, more resources and often who hold the belief that they are politically progressive and concerned about social justice issues.

The report offers Brighton and Hove as a “cautionary tale” to other local authorities considering reform of this kind. It describes the policy as “pulling a lever with relatively little mechanical advantage in the wrong direction”, and warns that policy made this way “risks doing more harm than good”.

We have already argued that the opposite conclusion can be drawn from the report’s own findings. But more than this, it is simply too early to declare. The school admission reforms are new, with the initial FSM priority impacting September 2025 admissions and the subsequent catchment changes plus Open Admissions from September 2026. Akin to other policy changes of this kind, we might not know for another five-plus years what this means for children from our poorest communities. Does this mean it shouldn’t have been done? Absolutely not. It is being independently evaluated, and this is the right course of action.

Passing this verdict now, before the evidence exists, we believe could have serious unintended consequences that we hope the author has taken into account:

• It gives people a reason not to try - why would you, if a Professor at a top university has already warned that reform of this kind risks doing more harm than good.

• It gives additional - and in our view false - legitimacy to the idea we encountered repeatedly during the campaign for change that people in communities like ours are stupid and don’t know what they are doing.

• It legitimises rolling back or watering down social mixing reforms elsewhere - giving other local authorities a citable reason not to start, or to abandon proposals before they’ve even begun, closing down political space that took years of campaigning to open.

• It shapes the evidence base before the evidence exists. If “this failed” becomes the received wisdom now, it changes how the policy is implemented, resourced and talked about for the next five years - risking a self-fulfilling prophecy within the very evaluation that is supposed to be independent.

• It conflates “too early to tell” with “proven not to work.” These are different claims, but once a Professor’s name is attached to a warning of failure, the distinction collapses in public and media debate - and is very hard to walk back once it’s out.

• It undermines the case for patient, long-term policy evaluation more broadly, creating pressure to judge - and abandon - any structural reform on unrealistic timescales, which disproportionately harms exactly the kind of slow-moving, systemic change disadvantaged communities need.

• It risks demoralising the practitioners and officials delivering the reform on the ground - the admissions teams, headteachers and local authority staff now operating under a public narrative of failure rather than one of “let’s see, and adjust as we learn.”

Final words

Brighton and Hove chose a fixable problem over an unfixable excuse. The admissions reforms are within the council’s power precisely because the causes of segregation are structural and the causes of absence are diffuse - the report’s own findings confirm this, even as it draws the opposite conclusion. Councillors do not need to wait five years to know that a system offering some families a choice of two schools and others a choice of one was unfair. That much was always true, whatever the modelling says about what happens next. We ask that the council hold its nerve, let the independent evaluation run its course, and continue the work - on attendance, on inequality, on admissions - that got us here.

And a word for other local authorities, and for national government, who may be reading this report and wondering what to learn from our city: do not let it teach you caution. Brighton and Hove has some of the most socially mixed schools in England and a comparatively small poverty attainment gap. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a cautionary tale. It is an invitation. The government’s own ambition - to halve the disadvantage gap, improve attendance and reform admissions - will need places willing to go first. Ours did. Yours can.

Download Professors Diane Reay and Stephen Gorard review of How to pull the right lever