Comments on 'Modelling social segregation' by Goldstein and Noden.

This brief paper is a commentary on a piece of work recently published in the Oxford Review of Education (Goldstein & Noden, 2003) which purports to create a multi-level model of the social segregation between schools in England 1994-1999. Segregation, as a measure of the (un)evenness of the distribution of disadvantaged students between schools, is an important characteristic of the school system, related to social cohesion and school effects (Gorard a at, 2003). Probably the first thing to note about the `new' approach by Goldstein and Noden to measuring such segregation is that, if we accept the findings at face value, then it produces results that have already been published (e.g. Gorard, 2000). Their substantive findings are that segregation between schools in England rose slightly from 1994 to 1999, and that areas with academic selection or a high proportion of schools with control over their own admissions tend to have higher and rising levels of social segregation. As is so often the case in practice (Gorard, 2003a), the use of multi-level modelling (MLM) in this instance tells us nothing new. MLM here appears to confirm results obtained using the far simpler approach of analysing segregation at varying levels of aggregation. In fact, this appearance is deceptive because Goldstein and Noden were not measuring segregation at all.