Two articles, both stating the fairly obvious, but in a way, don't they cancel out?
From King's College:
Eva Krapohl, joint first author of the study, from the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s, says:
"Previous work has already established that educational achievement is heritable. In this study, we wanted to find out why that is. What our study shows is that the heritability of educational achievement is much more than just intelligence – it is the combination of many traits which are all heritable to different extents.
"It is important to point out that heritability does not mean that anything is set in stone. It simply means that children differ in how easy and enjoyable they find learning and that much of these differences are influenced by genetics."
The researchers found that the heritability of GCSE scores was 62%. Individual traits were between 35% and 58% heritable, with intelligence being the most highly heritable. Together, the nine domains accounted for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores.
From the BBC:
Pupils in poorer areas were likely to have fewer high-performing schools in traveling distance.
And within local areas, when individual sought-after schools used distance as a tie-breaker, it meant that wealthier families could afford to buy houses to get nearer to the front of the queue.
"Poor parents have fewer high performing schools available to them. This will remain true as long as proximity, and hence the size of your mortgage, determines access to such schools," said Anna Vignoles, professor of education at Cambridge University.
The good school = high house prices dilemma is easily solved. Stop taxing output and employment and tax land values instead. So the people in the catchment areas are at least indirectly paying for the education of people in cheaper areas.
But having solved that dilemma, we are left with the general conclusion that as intelligence etc. is hereditary and clever/confident people tend to earn more money, the better off people will always be the ones who can afford to buy/pay the LVT on homes near the best schools.
So best to start again from the beginning and try and make all schools into 'good' schools. There's no argument against that. Pissing about with lotteries for school places is a hiding to nothing.