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Report co-author Simon Burgess says lottery systems play an important role

A controversial lottery system for secondary school places has failed in one of its key aims – to give poorer children equal access to top schools, academics say.

Researchers looked at Brighton and Hove which introduced England’s first city-wide lottery two years ago.

They say pupils in the poorest areas still have little chance of getting into the most popular schools.

Brighton and Hove Council says the system is fairer than the previous one.

It uses a lottery (also known as random allocation) on top of a catchment area system.

The city is divided into catchment areas and if a school is over-subscribed with applications from that area, a lottery is used as a tie-breaker to decide who should get a place.

In the past, places went to pupils who lived closest to the schools, leading critics to say pupils were being “selected by mortgage”.

Now, families living in wealthier areas close to their favoured school might not get a place there.

The changes sparked a major protest in Brighton, but they were declared to be fair by the Schools Adjudicator last year.

Deprived areas

Research presented to the British Educational Research Association on Friday says the system does not give equal chances to all pupils because catchment areas are still the main determinants of access to particular schools.

The new catchment areas are drawn in such a way that families in the poorest neighbourhoods still have little chance of getting into the most popular schools, according to the academics.

The most popular schools are in the centre of the city, while the most deprived areas are to the east and far west.

“The main lesson of our analysis is that the introduction of a lottery on its own is not enough to equalise access to the high-performing popular schools,” said Rebecca Allen of the Institute of Education, London, and Simon Burgess and Leigh McKenna from Bristol University in their report.

“The drawing of the catchment area boundaries is central to the outcome of the reform.”

The researchers say if anything, socio-economic segregation has increased slightly, although some students from wealthier neighbourhoods were now attending less academically successful secondaries than they might have expected to previously.

“These are the primary group losing out from the reform, balanced by a more diffuse group of winners who gained access to the higher performing schools,” the report says.

Fairer

Simon Burgess said there were two slightly different messages from the findings – but they were not contradictory.

He said although there was some “evening out”, the lottery had not equalised the chances of poorer pupils getting into the highest-performing schools.

“We all hoped and expected that the use of a lottery as opposed to proximity would make school admissions a little fairer.

“We were puzzled as to why that appeared not to be true. The reason is the catchment area.”

Brighton and Hove Council says it is too early to draw firm conclusions about the lottery.

A spokesman said: “The aim was to create a system that is fairer to more people than the previous system and ensure children could get places at a school that’s near to them. We argue that these aims have been achieved.

“The geographical spread across the city of our secondary schools meant that under the previous system children in large areas of the city were unable to get places at their local school – because they were too far away in terms of home to school distance – and were having to travel across the city to other schools instead.

“Under the catchment area based system we now have, all children get priority for a school that’s near to them.”

The council will review the system in 2012 as agreed when it was adopted, he said.

MIAMI – A passenger was detained and four of Miami International Airport’s six concourses were evacuated after a screener spotted something suspicious in a checked bag, authorities said.

A police bomb squad spent hours scouring the airport and passengers had to be evacuated from the complex Thursday night and airport roadways were closed down, police and airport officials said, describing the shutdown of the four concourses as a public safety precaution.

The airport fully reopened just after 4 a.m. Friday before the first scheduled morning departures, which signaled the start of the peak Labor Day weekend.

“Everything’s back to normal,” airport spokesman Greg Chin told The Associated Press soon after the closed concourses reopened.

He said the end of the evacuation order largely coincided with the nighttime drop-off in flights. Passengers, workers and others were allowed back in just as the airport was expecting the first of 1,500 passengers on flights between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. alone — and more thereafter.

The Transportation Security Administration declined to identify the passenger, stating in a terse statement that the screener spotted something suspicious in a checked back at about 9 p.m. Thursday. “The passenger was located and is now in law enforcement custody,” TSA’s statement said.

The statement also did not say what the suspicious item was but said a police bomb squad and other law enforcement agents deployed to the airport soon after.

The federal agency responsible for air travel security said four of the six concourses in the 2-mile long complex — Terminals E, F, G, and H — had been evacuated beginning late Thursday.

Miami-Dade Police said a bomb squad spent hours at the airport with fire officials and the others. Fire trucks and police vehicles stood by and a hazardous material team was spotted at the scene.

Police spokesman Alvaro Zableta had urged those with scheduled departures Friday to check with local air carriers.

Airport spokesman Greg Chin said between 100 and 200 passengers were evacuated initially.

“I’m still not sure how many flights came in during this time, but any that did were relocated to the eastern or western ends of the airport,” Chin said, adding parts of Concourses D and J remained open to flights while the evacuation order was in effect for remaining areas.

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Diaz is an Associated Press photographer. Associated Press Writer Bill Cormier in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Fugitive tycoon Asil Nadir has arrived at the Old Bailey for his first court appearance on fraud and theft charges.

The businessman, who has evaded trial since 1993, flew back from Cyprus to face fraud charges relating to the collapse of his Polly Peck empire.

A provisional trial date is expected to be fixed at the hearing and a bail surety of £250,000 has been paid.

It is alleged Mr Nadir, 69, secretly transferred £34m out of his company, leading to its collapse.

BUXTON, N.C. – Hurricane Earl churned past the North Carolina Outer Banks and its powerful gusts and driving rains were starting to be felt in southeastern Virginia early Friday, the beginning of at least 24 hours of stormy, windy weather along the East Coast.

Residents and officials of North Carolina’s barrier islands were waiting for daybreak to see how much damage the storm’s winds and waves had left behind. But National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Collins said Earl had produced little storm surge and only minor flooding in some coastal counties. Predictions of storm surges between 2 and 4 feet may be too much, he said.

Earl had weakened all day Thursday, winding down from a Category 4 storm with winds of 140 mph to a Category 2 storm with winds of 105 mph. But it still packed enough of a punch to send rain sideways and shake signs in Buxton, the southeasternmost tip of the Outer Banks.

In Nags Heads, with the eye the closest it was expected to get to the North Carolina coast, the rain lashed against window panes and the wind kicked up. At about 2 a.m., the tops of small trees were bending in the howling gusts and beach grass was whipping back and forth on dunes leading to the ocean. A couple hundred power outages were reported.

While more than 30,000 residents and visitors were ordered to leave the Outer Banks, more hardy residents gassed up their generators and hunkered at home behind their boarded-up windows, even though officials warned them that it could be three days before they could expect any help.

“It’s kind of nerve-racking, but I’ve been through this before,” said 65-year-old Herma De Gier, who has lived in the village of Avon since 1984. De Gier said she will ride out the storm at a neighbor’s house but wants to be close enough to her own property so she can quickly deal with any damage.

The eye of the hurricane was expected to get only about 100 miles east of the Outer Banks, not any closer, said Collins.

During its march up the Atlantic, it could snarl travelers’ Labor Day weekend plans with several flights already canceled. Forecasters said that a kink in the jetstream over the eastern U.S. should push the storm away from the coast, guiding it like a marble in a groove. Earl is expected to move north-northeast for much of Friday, staying away from New Jersey and the other mid-Atlantic states, but also passing very close to Long Island, Cape Cod and Nantucket, which could get gusts up to 100 mph.

The most likely place Earl will make landfall is on Saturday in western Nova Scotia, Canada, where it could still be a hurricane, said hurricane center deputy director Ed Rappaport.

Federal, state and local authorities were waiting for daylight to begin patrolling the North Carolina coast to check for damage. The Coast Guard planned to fly over the exposed barrier islands and was prepared for search-and-rescue helicopter flights.

The emergency management chief for one coastal North Carolina county said that high tide and the storm combined to wash over a portion of the Outer Banks highway N.C. 12 near Rodanthe. Dare County Emergency Management Director Sandy Sanderson said it was closed, but that the overwash was expected and nobody was out driving in the storm, anyway.

In Buxton, a two-story Comfort Inn had become a makeshift hurricane hostel for those who want to stay close to their homes but know they need better shelter.

Billy Parker, 55, choice to stay so he could keep an eye on his treasured property, but wasn’t taking any chances with his family. He sent his wife, mother-in-law and two daughters to Elizabeth City — two and a half hours away on the mainland.

“I don’t want them here,” Parker said. “I’d fear for their lives.”

Most of the hotel guests said they would rather get trapped on Hatteras Island than off it and prepared themselves for weeks without contact with the outside world.

Farther up the coast, governors in Massachusetts and Rhode Island declared states of emergency, joining North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick urged people living in low-lying areas prone to flooding to consider leaving their homes by Friday afternoon, although no officials evacuations had been announced outside of North Carolina. Officials on Nantucket Island, Mass., planned to set up a shelter at a high school on Friday.

“We’re asking everyone: Don’t panic,” Patrick said. “We have prepared well, we are coordinated well, and I’m confident that we’ve done everything that we can.”

Much of New England should expect strong, gusty winds much like a nor’easter, along with fallen trees and downed power lines, forecasters said.

“This is the strongest hurricane to threaten the Northeast and New England since Hurricane Bob in 1991,” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center.

In New York City, officials were on alert but said they expected to see only side effects of the storm — mostly rain and high winds, with possible soil erosion on the beaches and flooding along the oceanside coasts of Brooklyn and Queens.

“It’s going to stay out in the open water, but we’re going to have some effects here,” said Joseph Bruno, commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management.

The National Hurricane Center said Earl will keep chugging to the northeast, eventually striking western Nova Scotia, Canada, where it could still be a hurricane.

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Associated Press Writers David Fischer in Miami; Martha Waggoner, Emery Dalesio, Tom Foreman Jr. and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, N.C.; Tom Breen in Morehead City, N.C.; Bruce Smith in Jacksonville, N.C.; Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C.; Mark Pratt in Boston; David Porter in Trenton, N.J.; David Koenig in Dallas; Sara Kugler Frazier in New York; and Frank Eltman in Stony Brook, N.Y., contributed to this report.

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