Education Bill

My Lords, I support the idea that schools should have discretion in relation to admissions policy but it should be a clear, publicly stated admissions policy. Out of that, however, come two difficulties, one of which is the possibility of anarchy. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, indicated how that was the case. As a young, innocent parent who came to joust within the Inner London Education Authority, longer ago than I care to remember, there was an element of anarchy in the system. As a parent, if you were not savvy or did not know x, y and z, you could not crack it. There is an issue of anarchy here. If every school has its own admissions policy and there is no co-ordination, parents will find themselves in an anarchic situation but will not quite know it. The knowing and the well attached will do well. The second danger is fairness and unfairness. The point has been made and we need someone to take responsibility for saying whether or not cumulatively these admissions policies add up either to anarchy or unfairness. There may be better ways of doing it. The best way is having many excellent schools, but we are where we are. I draw quick comparisons with universities. There was a risk of anarchy in admissions systems a number of years ago as a number of universities expanded in the 1960s and thereafter. That anarchy was dealt with in part through creating UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. For example, there was an agreement that you could not apply to both Oxford and Cambridge, and that if you wanted to apply to one of them, you had to apply earlier. Rules were worked out so that people knew where they were. On the question of fairness, and here I put a direct question to the Government, in universities there is a sudden interest in fairness and access and OFFA may well have its powers increased to deal with a set of financial regulations about how universities are funded. It is interesting that in one educational context regulation and the imposition of fairness and unfairness is taking place, and yet in schools the same question of fairness is going in the other direction. We need consistency here.