This book has examined ethnic segregation between English state schools and whether it has increased or decreased over the years since the last major data collection – the national census of 2011. It has found that high levels of ethnic segregation do exist across schools between the majority White British population and some other ethnic groups such as the Bangladeshi and Pakistani, more so at the primary than secondary level of schooling, and more for those of greater affluence among the White British. However, the general trend has been towards desegregation and greater ethnic diversity within local authority areas and their schools. Because school intakes are broadly comparable in their ethnic composition to the characteristics of their surrounding neighbourhoods, as neighbourhoods have become more diverse so too have schools. Please refer to the summary of key findings (which follows the References) for an overview of each chapter.

We acknowledge the limitations of the study. Most importantly, the data are not fully complete about pupils and their schools. In part, that is because we omitted schools out of the usual mainstream system. Occasionally there are absences or missing fields in the data although those are unlikely to introduce any major systematic bias to the results. What will is the absence of a very particular type of school – private schools that are fee-charging. Data about their pupils and about the schools’ social and ethnic compositions are not available in the same way nor to the same level of detail that they are for state schools, an omission that ought to be addressed given the charitable status of many private schools and their need to show that they are beneficial to the public. It is hard to fully address debates on social selection and the role of education in driving social mobility, without having data from an important, distinctive and – in so far as it charges fees – socially selective part of the sector. And our analysis has necessarily been confined to England only.

We are conscious, too, of the risk of over-objectification of groups and of the critiques against ‘thinking with ethnicity’ (Carter and Fenton, 2010).