23 March 2007
All children should be able to attend good schools, or at least have an equal opportunity of doing so. But that's not the case at present. The controversial new code of admissions aims to even the odds, and so is likely to be heavily resisted by middle-class parents. Peter Wilby reports
Lecturing to the Royal Society of Arts this year, Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor from Arizona and the latest guru to enthral New Labour, explained that loss is a more powerful political weapon than gain. Promise people £50 if they insulate their homes, and they will ignore you. Tell them they'll lose £50
if they don't insulate, and they will stack their lofts with felt.
It's an insight familiar to chancellors of the Exchequer. A revenue-neutral tax reform – road-pricing instead of fuel duty, for example – is a political negative, because the losers are furious while the winners just aren't very grateful.
This truth is coming home to educational policy-makers, and particularly to Brighton and Hove City Council, which was surprised by a wave of protests over its decision to introduce a 'lottery' for next September's secondary school places. After all, the council had consulted parents widely over how it intended to comply with the new government code on school admissions, which takes effect this year. It had proposed a 'random allocation' system to come into play after other, more conventional, factors were taken into account.
'There was a consensus until the end,' says Pat Hawkes, chair of the schools committee, 'when some parents realised what they would lose.' That loss was the guarantee that, because they lived in the most expensive houses in town, they could send their children to the 'best' schools, as measured by test scores and exam results. The result was a huge row, which spilt over into the national media for several days.
Expect similar rows as more authorities try out variants of the Brighton scheme. Nothing causes parents, particularly middle-class parents, so much angst as secondary school admissions. Drugs, crime, underage sex, foul language, truancy, rap music, acne and smart answers, plus exam results that don't allow entry to a decent university – all these, it is feared, are the potential results of a bad secondary school. Go to a dinner party in Islington or Edgbaston, and they will talk of little else.
Once, most British parents accepted the rigidity of local authority catchment areas, as three in four US families still do, and shrugged their shoulders. In those days, school exam results weren't published, and educational credentials mattered less. Only a vociferous minority, whose children were dumped in the most disadvantaged schools, bothered to complain.
In the early 1980s, politicians came up with a different idea. Give parents a choice of schools, and two things would follow. First, parents would no longer feel that their children were trapped in bad schools, and poorer families in particular could escape from low-achieving schools in the inner cities and council estates. Second, competition to attract parents would raise standards and eventually put underperforming schools out of business, just as competition drove stale cheese or malfunctioning washing machines out of the shops.
The theory had three flaws, as many economists pointed out. First, education is an inelastic service. Popular schools cannot expand at will to accommodate parental customers – distance from such schools will, therefore, still favour some children over others.
Second, education is a positional good. Bring all schools up to the standard now attained by the best, and some parents will still be dissatisfied because the best have forged further ahead, and their children will still therefore get an inferior education.
Third, what makes a 'good school' – not solely, but above any other single factor – is the children who attend it. Recruit bright pupils from stable middle-class homes (those things don't always go together, but they do more often than not) and your results will soar. According to research by educational charity the Sutton Trust, the proportion of children on free school meals at the top 200 comprehensives (as measured by exam results) is just 5.8% against 14.3% nationally.
Over the past 20 years, politicians have extended parents' options by introducing, for example, technology colleges, grant-maintained schools, academies and more voluntary-aided or church schools. Such schools were allowed to break free of local authority catchment areas and control their own admissions.
Thus, it was said, the middle-class privilege of buying houses close to 'good' schools – the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors says such schools can add 12% to the value of a house – would be nullified. The notorious 'postcode lottery' would be at an end.
However, although there is some evidence that greater competition prompts better school performance, the theory didn't, on the whole, work out. England still has some 400 'failing' schools, whose standards are judged to be unacceptably low, and the vast majority are full of children from low-income homes. Segregation by social and sometimes ethnic background, ability and parental aspiration remains significant: the latest research from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics suggests that, whatever the performance advantages, 'market mechanisms in education may come at the cost of increased social polarisation'.
Middle-class parents are more likely to seek out the 'best' schools and to use 'gaming skills' to get a place, including taking a temporary address in the right area. At the same time, as teachers' careers and school funding depend more closely on exam results and league table positions, oversubscribed schools have more incentives to cherry-pick children. Interviews, primary school reports and church attendance records (a useful proxy for parental commitment and home discipline) are all used, particularly by church schools and others that control their own admissions, to weed out the unacademic, the unmotivated and the unruly.
The Sutton Trust found that the top comprehensives weren't, by any normal standards, comprehensive at all. In their postcode sectors, twice as many children were eligible for free meals as appeared on the schools' rolls. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, only 6% of the pupils in the bottom 10% of comprehensives are the high-achievers who would previously have passed the 11-plus. If those schools got the children who lived nearest, the proportion of high-achievers would be almost double that. Far from countering the postcode lottery, schools have thus become more segregated than their neighbourhoods.
Yet the number of dissatisfied parents has not apparently diminished. According to press surveys, 20% of parents – many more in urban areas – don't get their first choice of school. Appeals against school allocations (of which around one in three is successful) rose steadily to a peak of 10% of all secondary admissions in 2002/03. Although they have since fallen slightly, that is probably because of falling pupil numbers.
It is mainly thanks to Labour backbenchers that alternatives are now being considered. Tony Blair, as part of his 'legacy', wanted to establish 'trust schools', another category free of local authority control. They looked suspiciously similar to the grant-maintained schools the Tories had set up in 1987 – with the added irritant that some might be under private sector control – and Labour MPs threatened to block them. Blair got his way only at the price of tightening the admissions code to prevent the use of surreptitious selection methods.
The new code, which came into force in time for admissions next September, prohibits schools from interviewing children or their families and taking account of primary school reports about 'past behaviour, attendance, attitude or achievement'. Attempts to rule out religious affiliation fell foul of opposition from the Catholic Church, although both Catholic and Anglican schools promised to do more to get 'diverse' intakes.
But how, given the socially segregated neighbourhoods in most urban areas, can diversity be achieved? Most educationalists agree that, in the ideal comprehensive system, every school would have a mix of abilities and family backgrounds. There would be no schools with a preponderance of 'problem children' or any that scoop all the high-fliers.
This is not just a matter of social engineering to realise utopian visions of road-sweepers' sons and barristers' daughters rubbing happily along, creating a world where class divisions melt away. The evidence that genuinely mixed schools would improve standards is powerful. Research across the world suggests that, next to a child's own family background, the most important influence on achievement is the background of his or her classmates. So parents who want to keep their children away from the 'rougher sort', far from being blinkered snobs, are making wise educational decisions. Poor children in middle-class schools, according to US research, will outperform middle-class children in schools where the majority come from poor homes.
The state of Wisconsin has even put figures on it: a 10% increase in the proportion of middle-class classmates improves the performance of low-income pupils by 6.4% in reading and 7.2% in maths.
Nor is this a zero-sum game. After reviewing the US literature, the IPPR reported last year: 'The positive influence of middle-class children on disadvantaged children is not offset by a corresponding reverse negative impact, as long as there is a critical mass of middle-class children.' In other words, those who argue that social mixing will do nothing to create good schools – the most common criticism of Brighton's lottery – could not be more wrong.
The lottery is one means of bringing about this elusive social mixing. The idea was brought into the mainstream in 2004 by the Social Market Foundation, then directed by Philip Collins, now a Downing Street adviser. The foundation proposed the abolition of catchment areas and the creation of a national admissions system, overriding both local authorities and individual schools. Parents would list six schools in order of preference. Where a school had more first preferences than places, a lottery (the foundation preferred 'ballot') would decide the lucky ones. The unplaced families would then go into the hat for their second and subsequent preference schools where these hadn't been filled by first preferences. A child from a Lambeth council tower block would thus have a shout of attending a school in one of the leafier outer London boroughs. House location would cease to be relevant.
'By offering the poorest children the same prospects of entering the best schools as the richest,' wrote Collins, 'the system would be equitable.' As a solution to school admissions, it has elegance, simplicity and wide ideological appeal. Parents would still have choice – but whether they got what they wanted would be decided in a new way. Schools would be more likely to get the mix of abilities and backgrounds that, as we have seen, helps the poorest. Best of all, insisted Collins, the stimulus for schools to raise their game would be stronger than ever. They could no longer 'rely on an intake of well-behaved middle-class children to produce good results, but would instead have to focus on teaching standards'.
Alas, the scheme is a political non-starter. Parents would never accept their child having no better chance of attending a school on their doorstep than a child from 20 miles away. In any case, the system would probably leave class ghettos in place since working-class parents are far more likely to be content with their local school.
The IPPR therefore favours a different solution: banding by ability. This would tackle segregation head on rather than leaving it to the vagaries of a lottery. Local authorities would divide applicants to all schools in their areas into three ability bands. Schools would be required to admit proportionate numbers from each band and only then would the more familiar criteria for allocating places in oversubscribed schools – distance, religious faith and so on – come into play.
This scheme, too, has weaknesses, as the Inner London Education Authority found when it used a version of it before its abolition in 1986. Schools in deprived areas tend to be left with spare places in the top band, and middle-class parents fiercely resist having their children bussed in to make up the numbers. You can also, argues Ann Rossiter, Collins's successor at the SMF, 'get a situation where parents try to second-guess which band it's best for their child to be in – the lottery is a less manipulatable approach'.
Nevertheless, both 'random allocation' and 'fair banding' are encouraged by the new admissions code. More local authorities, as well as schools that control their own admissions, are proposing a mix of methods, with parental choice, catchment areas, banding and lotteries all coming into play, as they will do in Brighton.
Sir Cyril Taylor, chair of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (which now covers the majority of secondary schools), wants trust schools and academies to form groups that will distribute children from the different ability bands fairly between themselves. He believes the majority will do so for admissions in 2008. Children close to the school, he argues, should still have preference but some places should be reserved for those from an 'outer catchment area'.
Random allocation would be used where, say, the number of high-ability children exceeded places in the high-ability band reserved for the inner catchment area. The child in the next street would still have a much better chance than the child living five miles away, but not a complete certainty of a place.
'We've got to get away from admission purely by the size of your mortgage,' Taylor says. Tell that to the middle classes. As fairer admissions schemes go ahead, many will find, not only that their children miss out on a favoured comprehensive, but also that the value of their houses, previously inflated by proximity to high-achieving schools, suddenly plummets. And if you believe, with Robert Cialdini, in the power of loss as a political force, you will tremble at the consequences.
Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman
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