When Non-Natives Compete for Top Schools: Displacement and Attainment in Primary Education

Abstract

We study how immigration affects natives’ access to public schools by examining competition for primary-school places in England after the 2004 EU enlargement. The post-enlargement inflow was large and concentrated among Polish migrants, who were disproportionately likely to satisfy faith-based admissions criteria and therefore intensified competition for high-performing, state-funded Catholic schools. To address endogenous migrant location choices, we construct an instrument for post-2004 Polish settlement patterns using the location and capacity of post-World War II Polish resettlement camps digitized from archival records. Combining this historical variation with administrative data on the universe of pupils in public primary schools, we estimate the causal effects of local exposure to non-native pupils at school entry. We find that higher non-native exposure displaces native pupils from Catholic schools toward non-faith schools and toward closer schools with slightly weaker baseline performance and a less advantaged pupil intake. It also reduces natives’ test scores at the end of primary school. Using sibling-priority rules and within-school designs with family fixed effects, we show that these attainment effects are driven primarily by displacement across schools rather than adverse within-school interactions. Joint paper with Elisa Facchetti, Elisabetta Pasini, and Barbara Petrongolo.