News from the New Party

Admission not impossible

As previously noted, the matter of school admissions is now regarded as so sensitive by some local authorities that they are prepared to use anti-terrorist legislation to police it.  This rather gives ammunition to Jennie Bristow's thesis that the whole notion of parental choice in education is destructive:

Our eldest daughter starts primary school in September. Now the long-awaited Admissions List has come down from the local council, we know which school. Is it a good school? Yes. Was it a school that we chose? No. Does it matter? No, not really. So what, I wonder, has the past few months been all about?

As a parent, every now and then you feel forced to play the game. A basic understanding of maths and geography, combined with a sporadic reading of the national papers, is enough to teach you that the issue of ‘school choice’ in the UK is something of a misnomer. You cannot simply choose to send your child to the best school in the area, as it will be massively oversubscribed; you can choose to send your child to the nearest school to your house, in the hope that it will have places, but that’s more about where you happen to live than what you choose to do. And as ever, affluent areas tend to have the best schools...

From parents’ point of view, the suspicion that ‘choice’ is something of a sham seems to collude with a deeply held reluctance to give up that choice. And while this is pretty irrational, when you’re going through the process it starts to make a certain sense. After all, we are continually told, our children’s educational achievement is our responsibility. The state can send them to school, sure, but their SATS results and all that follows (glittering professional career and long, healthy life versus low-skilled job with bad diet and too much telly) is ultimately, apparently, down to whether we read to them at night and do their homework properly....

Above all, the consumer-choice approach represents the extent to which education has become politicised - used by policymakers for instrumental ends that have little to do with the provision of high-quality education to all the nation’s children. Parents feel compelled to play the game because they are encouraged to do so, by a policy that sees schools as a way of making parents take their responsibilities seriously. The idea seems to be that parents will take the bait of ‘choice’ in order to engage with the business of their children’s schooling, thereby becoming active citizens and ensuring, as a result of naked self-interest, that their child’s school will be OK.

In this low-aspirational, politicised perspective, the notion that an education system can help children to transcend social background, through the promotion of knowledge and the recognition of a child’s academic achievements, is lost. It all comes right back down to who your parents are - where they live, how hard they appeal, and whether they have the time, inclination, energy and ability to compensate for the gaps in the education provided by schools.

This is desperately unfair. But in the absence of a broader educational aspiration for schools, as opposed to an instrumental one, the solution cannot be simply to say: ‘No choice.’ As parents, however you may balk at having to play the game, the fact that you want the best for your child - and are prepared to go all out to get it - is to be expected. To ‘do a Brighton’, and remove from parents all pretence of choice and control through allocating their children through a lottery system, is only more honest and fair to the extent that it dismisses parents’ reasonable understanding that there is a difference between schools, and that it is in their own child’s interest to be on the right side of that divide.

Allocating affluent children of ambitious parents to less popular (that is, less good) schools will not create a universal, high-quality education for all - just a gang of pissed-off parents, who feel that their best efforts at doing right by their child have been stamped upon by a political administration that, in all other respects, keeps nagging them to make precisely these choices.

Whilst it is indisputable that for many parents these days the very idea of parental choice is largely illusory, we cannot agree that the ideal of parental choice itself is a bad thing.  Although some parents clearly are motivated to fraudulent or underhand activity in order to gain a place in a particular school for their children, the reasons for this are not always straightforward.  If only it were true that all schools are, basically, good schools.  The problem is not with parents trying to gain places in the very best schools; rather, it is with parents trying to avoid the very worst schools.

Implicitly recognising this, opponents of parental choice stress the importance of bringing all schools up to scratch: if all schools perform tolerably well, the sensitivity of the issue of school place admissions becomes less acute.  Decades of efforts to achieve this, however, have failed - notwithstanding the continual downgrading of academic qualifications to produce a false impression of ever-increasing standards.

The reason parental choice in education remains a chimera is that there is insufficient capacity in the system to support meaningful choice for all parents.  All children have to go somewhere, and in a system where so many schools are oversubscribed (not just the very best ones), many families are doomed to lose out.

The answer is, obviously, to increase capacity.  We need more schools - and a greater variety of schools - to free up the system.  We need a greater variety of schools, firstly to give parents a real choice in education, but also to allow for experimentation and initiative to show where the best practice lies.  We need increased capacity throughout the system to make the possibility of parental choice a reality by tackling the problem of over-subscribed schools.  If schools are funded according to the number of students they attract, the incentive to improve standards will increase.  Bad schools will improve, or else disappear to be replaced by better schools.  It is no more impossible to provide parental choice in education than it is to provide a decent education system to serve all children: in both cases the long term answer is the same.