Random allocation of places (not by distance) : thoughts and experiences?

[ParentOfOne]

I understand that some schools in England allocate places by random allocation rather than by distance. Michaela in Wembley (NW London), Kingsdale in Dulwich (SE London), some schools in Brighton.

I also understand that a similar system is more common in some other countries.

Who has experience of this system? What do you think are the pros and cons? Would you welcome this system being implemented nationwide?

I think admission by distance can make sense for primary schools, because children are too young to go alone, and being allocated a school that's far can make parents' logistics a nightmare.

For secondary schools I'm not sure what to think.

On one hand I'd welcome getting rid of the tyranny of having to live next to good schools, and the admission by income/wealth which it indirectly causes.

On the other hand, I wonder if we can end up in situations where no person gets their preference. Eg what if I wanted school A, you wanted school B, but this random allocation allocates me to B and you to A? Is this a real risk? Is there a way around it?

Thoughts?

@Hercisback1 So a policy which might maybe work for London (which is ca. 13-15% of the country's population) should not even be looked into... because it wouldn't work elsewhere? I don't follow your logic!

@ParentOfOne for an awful lot of the country - including cities - public transport is a load of crap.
It's also not free for under 16s in most places (unlike London and - I believe - Scotland).
So allocating children to a random school without the means of them getting there (either because of no transport or it's too expensive) is just nuts.

I give up.

I have been shouting from the rooftop from the very beginning that this might only make sense where there is good public transport, and many of you keep repeating that wherever you live there isn't.

I guess that's the internet.

The interesting point about Brighton was that mixing the pupils up by a random allocation actually increased the performance of one of the schools. Might have happened anyway but suspect more “middle class” pupils will have helped.

Sounds shit if you have 3 kids at 3 different schools and they all need to be there at 8:50.

Or you walk past the school at the end of your road, to get the bus past 2 other schools to get to the one furthest away...

That's the point. People know it wouldn't work so no one wants it.

??? No, people lack basic text comprehension skills.

If the whole premise is that this can only work where there is public transport, then saying "oh but here and there public transport is poor" is not knowing that it wouldn't work, is lacking the most basic text comprehension skills required to understand that no one ever proposed this in an area with poor public transport.

Brighton has a version of this system.
Micaela in London has random allocation in a 5 mile radius.
If traffic and commuting times shot up as a result, let's just say that no one has proved it.

It is perfectly possible to still have a sibling policy.
Plus we are talking about secondary schools. Secondary school kids in areas with good public transport can easily go to school by themselves.

@ParentOfOne to be fair.... public transport or not - most people I know simply wouldn't want random allocations.

Finally a honest admission that doesn't resort to improbable excuses!

One of our reasons about choosing Yorkshire over London (beside house prices etc!) Was knowing that we could chose a house and know DD (with additional needs, but not severe enough to count for admissions) would go to the school we targeted as being right for her. Not the stress of waiting to see which one of 6 schools, if any, listed on a form. Or long commutes etc. And we do not regret that decision.

(The catchment covers million pound houses favoured by premiership footballers and council flats incidentally. The joys of less dense housing)

It won't work in London, though. It'll disadvantage lower income families, cause traffic pressures even worse than they are already and result in greater costs to schools in respect of the resultant upsurge in admissions appeals due to parents exercising their legal right to appeal because they haven't been allocated a place by a distance tie breaker.

Why would it disadvantage lower income families @NeverDropYourMooncup? I think OP's point is that the current system disadvantages lower income families (due to unaffordable house prices near good schools) and this would improve that.

@NeverDropYourMooncup Still with this nonsense?

Why more appeals?
Brighton did not see more appeals.
Micaela's school in London did not witness an abnormally high number of appeals when it introduced random allocation in a 5-mile radius.
I asked before, I will ask again: why do you think introducing this kind of policy in more London schools would be different and would result in more appeals? More appeals based on what? Will your answer be a deafening silence this time, too?

How would it disadvantage lower income families? Right now, rich families can buy or rent, even if only for a short period, next to a good schools, where houses cost more. Poor families cannot do that. Plus, like I said, it remains possible to give priority to families on a certain income (be that assessed via free school meals, access to universal credit or else)

How would it cause traffic pressure if we set one priority zone of 2kms and another of up to 4km? Again Micaela uses 5 miles (8km), and that's in Wembley, which is not even inner London. 2 kms is perfectly walkable.

It would be more honest to admit if you don't like these systems because the current system lets you buy your way to the certainty of a given school, if you can buy or rent close enough, whereas the new system removes that certainty.

I don't think it would really work in London either.

Who wants a 30 minute commute when it could be 3 minutes?

It wouldn't create better schools anyway.

I have absolutely no skin in this game (kids go private), and it’s quite tedious of you to accuse anyone who disagrees with you of self interest.

There is a lot to be said for certainty of knowing which your most likely school is, whether you are well within the last distance admitted in the last few years etc. I appreciate there are school black spots of uncertainty, but this system would lead to much more uncertainty.

Commuting to and from school can be tiring. And for all you say about limited areas (ranging in your different posts from 2km to 5km), clearly the closer a child is, the shorter and simpler their commute (on foot, preferably). Mine have a long commute (our choice and I own that) and cancelled trains or transport alerts can stretch days even longer.

Talking about applying this only to “areas of good public transport” is really quite limiting. Even within London, there may or may not be a direct and reliable bus/train/tube between any two given points. Other cities will also suffer from this - transport often is structured on a hub and spoke model, meaning you head into a central point eg nearest mainline station and back out again on a different bus, rather than being able to go direct. Also - bus routes change, get less frequent etc - a plausible route one year might be less so a year later.

And I also think there’s something to be said for having broadly the same system across the country. How do you decide when local public transport is “good enough” for a random allocation? If c13% of children in school are in London, as you mentioned, when does London shade into the Home Counties? What if there are red double decker in Cheam but none two miles away in Ewell, which of them qualifies?

Honestly, it seems a lot more woolly than the current system. And honestly, I don’t think people want random school allocations, they want all schools to be good so that they know their nearest school is good and so have no reason to want any other! So putting effort into redesigning a system in a way that - by your own oft repeated statement - can only apply to certain urban areas - seems a lot less preferable than efforts to improve schools overall.

Well, they'd possibly still be travelling 45 minutes past 3 schools, whilst other kids travel 45 minutes in the opposite direction to get to the school 2 minutes walk away from your house...

Im .not sure your random allocation would work that well in reality.
You'd have to have some sort of admission policy for things like ECHP, looked after kids, covenants on schools, etc then you're saying it's siblings? But surely if there's not enough paces left for all siblings, it's going to be random? You could still easily end up with kids at different schools.
Child A gets allocated School X in 2025, twin B gets allocated School X in 2027, but twin C was randomly allocated School Y, because there isn't enough space?

Would you be able to appeal those decision? On what criteria?

Maybe the transport pressure is people moving 3 miles away from their closest school, to be passed by another child travelling in the opposite direction away from their" closest school.... Multiplied by 2000.

Well, actually, they did.

For secondary school, government data for 2024 based upon reporting in Census;

6.9% of parents in Brighton submitted an appeal in 2024
4.6% went to panel
38.4% were successful

2.4% in Chelsea (inner London)
2.1% went to panel
14.3% were successful

3.8% in Brent (Michaela's borough, outer London)
3.4% to panel
1.6% were successful

The data by school isn't openly available as it could potentially identify individual students.

If I pull the same data from 2019

Brighton - 3.9%
Chelsea - 7.4%
Brent - 2.2%

Which suggests that something quite significant has happened in Brighton's admissions system for such an increase in secondary appeals in that time (at the same time, something significant has also happened in Chelsea that fewer parents are submitting appeals).

Every appeal costs schools money. Which is fine as it's the parents' legal right - but anything that increases dissatisfaction leading to appeals and their costs still needs to come from school budgets.

Didn't Brighton introduce its scheme around 2008? Or was it a pilot in 2008 and the full scheme around 2010? Either way, your own data doesn't prove that the introduction of this scheme corresponded with an increase in appeals. This scheme was there in 2019 and in 2024. If there were more appeals in 2024, it's hard to believe it was because of this scheme only

Why do you think it will lead to better schools OP?

I didn't say that I know it will lead to better schools.

I said I think it will reduce the unfairness and injustice of distance as a proxy for income.

I would have ideally liked to hear from people with experience of the Brighton system or of other systems with elements of random allocation. But most comments have been negative rebuttals from people with no experience of the system.

Distance as a proxy for income is such a tiny issue, especially in the places you propose this idea. Distance as a proxy for income is much more exaggerated in lower density population areas.

The impact of this in London would be relatively small, and nowhere else has good enough transport.

For example I live 8km from Birmingham City centre. Within your system I'd potentially have a 50 minute car journey to a school 4km away. Yet the local school is no better or worse than the ones 3km away. I'd rather my children were part of a community school and could walk their with friends.

According to most people in this thread, Brighton shouldn't have done it. Yet it did it. And the sky didn't fall.

Now, I don't know for a fact that this system improved the situation in Brighton. That was very much the question, that was why I wanted to hear from those with experience of the system.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/14/school-admissions-lottery-system-brighton

I can't find much recent evidence, but initial studies didn't seem great.