Aspiration, Attainment and Success accepted

Back in February last year I wrote a blog post describing my initial work using agent-based modelling to examine spatial patterns of school choice in some of London's education authorities. Right at the start of this month I presented a summary of the development of that work at the IGU 2013 Conference on Applied GIS and Spatial Modelling (see the slideshare presentation below). And then this week I had a full paper with all the detailed analysis accepted by JASSS - the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. Good news!


One of the interesting things we show with the model, which was not readily at the outset of our investigation, is that parent agents with above average but not very high spatial mobility fail to get their child into their preferred school more frequently than other parents - including those with lower mobility. This is partly due to the differing aspirations of parents to move house to ensure they live in appropriate neighbourhoods, given the use of distance (from home to school) to ration places at popular schools. In future, when better informed by individual-level data and used in combination with scenarios of different education policies, our modelling approach will allow us to more rigorously investigate the consequences of education policy for inequalities in access to education.

I've pasted the abstract below and because JASSS is freely available online you'll be able to read the entire paper in a few months when it's officially published. Any questions before then, just zap me an email.



Millington, J.D.A., Butler, T. and Hamnett, C. (forthcoming) Aspiration, Attainment and Success: An agent-based model of distance-based school allocation Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation

Abstract
In recent years, UK governments have implemented policies that emphasise the ability of parents to choose which school they wish their child to attend. Inherently spatial school-place allocation rules in many areas have produced a geography of inequality between parents that succeed and fail to get their child into preferred schools based upon where they live. We present an agent-based simulation model developed to investigate the implications of distance-based school-place allocation policies. We show how a simple, abstract model can generate patterns of school popularity, performance and spatial distribution of pupils which are similar to those observed in local education authorities in London, UK. The model represents ‘school’ and ‘parent’ agents. Parental ‘aspiration’ to send their child to the best performing school (as opposed to other criteria) is a primary parent agent attribute in the model. This aspiration attribute is used as a means to constrain the location and movement of parent agents within the modelled environment. Results indicate that these location and movement constraints are needed to generate empirical patterns, and that patterns are generated most closely and consistently when schools agents differ in their ability to increase pupil attainment. Analysis of model output for simulations using these mechanisms shows how parent agents with above-average – but not very high – aspiration fail to get their child a place at their preferred school more frequently than other parent agents. We highlight the kinds of alternative school-place allocation rules and education system policies the model can be used to investigate.