School Admissions and Accountability: Planning, Choice or Chance?

The processes for allocating places at secondary schools in England are always controversial. School Admissions and Accountability addresses issues relevant to school admissions over the past sixty years, exploring three primary ways it has been done: planning via local authorities, quasi-market mechanisms, and random allocation. Each approach is assessed on its own terms, but also examined via constitutional and legal analysis. The book shows how repeated failure to identify and pursue specific values for school admissions underlies questions regarding the fairness of the process. Interdisciplinary in approach, it makes the issue of school admissions relevant and accessible to a wide readership in education, social policy, and sociolegal studies.?