Introduction

Schooling is crucial, in its accreditation function, as a means of accessing employment and in its other tangible and intangible benefits for the individual and society. The path of our future life will be heavily determined by the quality of education we receive as children. Therefore, understanding the way that families access secondary schools for their children and the effectiveness (or not) of the school admissions systems and safeguards that the state puts in place is of profound importance. The significance of schooling is recognised explicitly in the Universal Declaration of Rights – the United Nations’ ‘common standard of achievement for all people’ – which includes the right to free education up to elementary and standard level (Article 26). But beyond such grand statements of intent or aspiration, the legal and administrative frameworks that individual states use to guarantee and deliver access to such educational provision may choose to be explicit (or not) about the expectations or entitlements its citizens will have.

In the English school system that evolved following the passing of the 1944 Education Act (EA44), the allocation of places within a tripartite system of secondary schooling was certainly contentious, with the obtaining of a place at a grammar school being seen as offering an enormous increase in subsequent life chances. Despite the sentiment expressed in EA44 that all types of schools would have ‘parity of esteem’, from the 1960s to the early 1980s debate persisted, varying only in level of intensity, about the place and role of selective admission to grammar schools or the perceived non-selective alternative of a genuinely comprehensive school system. From the late 1980s, with the introduction of a range of quasi-market forces, initially under the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA), the way in which school places are allocated has become a vitally important issue, relating to an increasingly diverse range of forms of organisation for state schools. Throughout this period, questions of social justice and social mobility have come in and out of focus in the context of ‘the admissions question’ and, along with expectations and claims relating to meritocracy, egalitarianism and citizenship, have dominated debate at different times.