Estimating the Socioeconomic Characteristics of School Populations with the Aid of Pupil Postcodes and Small-Area Census Data: An Appraisal

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Abstract
It is becoming increasingly important to understand the social and economic circumstances under which schools operate. Benchmarking school performance targets, contextualising performance outcomes, and Ofsted inspections all rely upon measures of the socioeconomic status of school populations. These tend to utilise administrative data—such as the percentage of pupils eligible for free school meals—or census data for the ward or neighbourhood of wards in which a school is located. This last approach brings to bear the remarkable wealth of information contained within the census, but it suffers from the fact that schools seldom draw their pupils exclusively, or even predominately, from their immediate hinterlands. The authors discuss a method of estimating the socioeconomic characteristics of school populations which, using a program called NCP Profiler to link individual pupil postcodes with census data at the enumeration district level, is sensitive to the manner in which schools actually recruit students—an increasingly important consideration as the quasi-market in education leads to the effective dismantling of geographically defined school catchment areas.