School choice in England

László Sándor points me to an Economist blog post about school choice: Schools admissions codes--Playing games.

It begins with a nice paragraph about how school choice, and other selection processes, are two-sided matching markets.

"CHOICE is a central tenet to the reform of public services, whether it is made by patients seeking the best hospital care or parents looking for a decent education for their child. But there is another, widely neglected aspect to choice: that made by those who head publicly-funded institutions. It is all very well for a youngster to chose to apply to Oxford University, but admissions tutors also chose which candidates to admit.
...
"The rule book that governs all this is absurdly complex, and education secretary Michael Gove is bent on simplifying it. On May 27th he  launched a consultation* on the proposed new admissions code. It suggests that selecting pupils by lottery (as Brighton does) rather than by how close they live to the school should be banned. More controversially it also proposes that the children of school staff should be offered places ahead of others, a practise that was banned only a few years ago and which,  research suggests, led to good schools being forced to take pupils from poorer homes. For the first time, it recommends, head teachers should be free to admit children whose families have incomes that are so low that the children are offered free school meals.
The reasoning behind these proposals is fairly clear: they are necessary to make palatable the opening of the independently-run but state-funded "free" schools, the first tranche of which will admit pupils in September. These schools can be established by parents who might then be unable to get their child into the schol under the existing rules, hence the suggestion that such pupils should be favoured over others."

*this link only seems to work from the original article, linked at the top...