Education and Inspections Bill

I am delighted that the Government have introduced their amendments and that the right reverend Prelate was complicit in them, because they will allow a gentle but much-needed improvement in the way that some Church schools approach admissions. Generally, I take the view that admissions criteria and arrangements have to tackle some insoluble problems and will never be perfect, but there are two principles that should be borne in mind; one is fairness and access for all and the other is to give parents some sense of stability and the comfort of knowing that they will be able to get a reasonable school, from one point of view or another, for their children. I have particular difficulties with banding as a method, not because there are not some justifications for it in certain circumstances, but because it produces an unholy level of uncertainty for parents who are looking to know which school they might possibly get their children into. Not only can a school’s catchment area vary year by year, but its admissions policy can vary in four or five different ways, according to the random pattern of applications and how children score in an examination. That makes it extremely difficult to know whether or not one has a right of entry to, say, Camden School for Girls. This pitches parents into the sort of arena that those who patronise the independent sector are used to, but which is none the less a source of considerable discomfort for them. In the end, when one looks at banding arrangements that have been running for some while, as in some of the CTCs, one finds that the middle classes can work them just as well as they can any other kind of admission arrangements. They notice where the wider bands are; they get tutors to tell their children how to score within those bands, which they do; and the proportion of the middle class that gets into the good CTCs starts to creep up. Not surprisingly, the middle class is a very resourceful and determined group. However, I should like to see an admissions arrangement that genuinely offered all children a chance to access all schools. The only sensible way of doing that is through a completely unconditional ballot, although I am not saying that that ballot would by any means be applied to anything like a whole school population. When we were discussing religion, the right reverend Prelate said that he would like to reserve a part of a religious school’s intake for people of that religion. There is a very good argument for allowing schools to have a strong bias towards people who live close to them because, in many cases, schools are part of the community. Those who run grammar schools would doubtless argue that they have to select at least a proportion of their pupils, although that is not an argument that the Government have accepted in the case of Northern Ireland. There, they have said that, although a school can have an academic character and say that it will be run on academic lines, all parents should be allowed to choose it as the school to which they would like their child to be admitted. I think that that is reasonable: schools operate in that way. If you look at, for example, the sixth-form colleges in Cambridge—Hills Road and Long Road—you will see that there is no substantial difference in admission criteria between the two. One happened to be the boys’ grammar school and the other the girls’ grammar school. They have evolved so that Hills Road is the more academic and Long Road is the broader, and they are both extremely good sixth-form colleges. Schools will move and change in that direction and, by establishing an academic character for a school, as in Hills Road, you can create an academic school without having to select. You can certainly have academic schools that do not select a proportion of their children on academic criteria but, rather, rely on parents to apply and still end up with an academic school. Parents, being mildly sensible, will not generally pitch their ordinary kid into the high-flown world of a top academic grammar; they will take advice on subjects and decide to choose another school. I think that there is scope for opening up every school in England on the basis that a proportion of the children—I would start at 25 per cent—should be admitted, or be capable of admission, by unconditional ballot. It would also be possible to combine that with giving parents an unconditional right to have access to an individual school on the old catchment area basis. Parents would be faced with a form that said that, if they put Holland Park Comprehensive as one of their chosen schools, they would be guaranteed a place there if none of their higher preferences accepted them. But they could also go in for the ballot at any number of other schools and they might well find that they were successful. They would then be guaranteed a place at a school that was sensibly close to them and, although that school might not be acceptable to them, they would at least have certainty. Quite a large proportion of the population want the certainty of getting their children into a neighbourhood school or one that is convenient for them. At the same time, that system would open up the possibility of their applying to any school and getting into what have previously been closed geographical or religious ghettos, where only the rich kids go because their parents have bought the right house or have been to mass every weekend for the past five years and have contributed to Church funds—or whatever the admission criteria might be. Obviously you cannot do that immediately, but you can work in that way. If you find a school that, in practice, is not admitting 25 per cent of its children by ballot because its admissions are taken up by those who have a right to be in that school, then you allow that school to expand or, if it will not expand, you adjust the catchment area. So, over time, it should be possible to work to a position where any good school is admitting children roughly in the proportion of 75 per cent who are there by right and 25 per cent by ballot. Therefore, any child, within the possible constraints of transport, would have a right to apply to, and have a decent chance of getting into, any school, which is not the case at the moment. That would put us in a position where we could say that we were genuinely opening up access to our best schools to all pupils, which is what I would like to aim at as an objective. I appreciate that the Government are heading in the right direction, and I hope that, over time, our Front Benches will reach agreement on what we intend to achieve in the way of admission arrangements. To my mind, co-ordinated admissions have been a great success. They give a great deal of comfort and ease to parents and they reduce the possibility of people finding themselves cast into limbo. We can continue to improve on that and we can continue to work away at ensuring that those who happen to be born within the catchment area of a school that does not suit them for one reason or another have a good chance of getting into another school that does suit them, whatever the geographical or religious admission criteria that apply to that school at present.