The current school admission system, which focuses largely on proximity, “works against” children from disadvantaged backgrounds, according to new research.

This further entrenches the divide between wealthy and poor pupils, as the latter is more likely to miss out on the opportunity of attending a high-performing school.

The collaborative study from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Cambridge University, reported that these “constraints” are a major factor for promoting “unequal allocation” of pupils across schools.

Location, the team said, is a big deciding factor in determining what school a child will attend, more so than personal preferences. The wealthier you are, the more likely you will be based near a high-performing school.

Therefore, as income diminishes, so too does accessibility to these schools, which, along with other factors, widens the gap between rich and poor.

"Poor parents have fewer high performing schools available to them,” commented Anna Vignoles, professor of education at Cambridge University. “This will remain true as long as proximity, and hence the size of your mortgage, determines access to such schools.”

She added that “more imaginative” approaches to the schools admission system are desperately needed if any tangible change is to happen.

In particular, the study authors concluded, the relationship between high-performing schools and wealth needs to end. There has to be an “alternative to proximity as a tiebreaker”.

Around the world, a lottery system is used successfully for quality schools. However, in England, this is all but absent.

“Schools could set aside a fraction of places for applicants who live beyond the ‘catchment’ area of the school,” the report authors noted in a blog.

“Alternatively, schools could apply a banding system often used in the past, whereby schools’ intake of pupils is spread across the distribution of prior attainment or socio-economic background.”