The belief that children thrive if educated amongst higher-achieving schoolmates guides many parents in their choice of school. We extend the literature on this issue by considering children making the transition from primary to secondary schooling at age-11 in England. We use year-to-year...

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy - particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribution and where there is much concern about low social mobility. An anomaly...