We analyse the initial impact of a major school admission reform in Brighton and Hove. The new system incorporated a lottery for oversubscribed places and new catchment areas. We examine the post‐reform changes in school composition. We locate the major winners and losers in terms of the quality of school attended. We match similar cities and conduct a difference‐in‐difference analysis of the policy change. The results are complex: we see an increase in student sorting but we also see a significant weakening of the dependence of school attended on student’s prior attainment.

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