School’s back. Most of the nation’s pupils barely had time to cover their exercise books or learn their new timetables before Ed Balls, the dynamic young children’s, schools and families secretary, kicked off the new political term with lavish praise for, and encouragement of, the growing number of religious schools.
This was disappointing news for those who hoped for a shift of emphasis or spotted some new mood music from New Labour Mark Two. Gordon Brown’s deliberate reference, on entering Downing Street earlier this summer, to his own local schooling was clearly significant. Few would expect to see this prime minister’s children travel across London to attend a highly selective religious school.
But the public policy signs on education are not quite so promising. Even before Tony Blair had left Downing Street, Brown was praising the highly controversial and unproven city academies programme and promising to roll out hundreds more of these quasi-independent state schools.
Add to this Balls’ evident enthusiasm for the role that faith schools play in promoting ‘social cohesion’ and his pledge to bring more Islamic schools into the state sector, and it is pretty clear that this government is sticking to the choice and diversity agenda in education.
Yet there are strong signs — some coming from inside government itself — that this very same agenda has actually run into the ground. Economic inequality is growing in our society, and not surprisingly our messy patchwork of a national school system — neither fully selective nor anywhere near comprehensive — is increasingly reflecting and reinforcing the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots.
According to DCSF data on school admissions in the capital, analysed by Public Finance last week, choice is least available to those who need it most: the poor. Figures for 2007 on the school destinations of secondary pupils in inner London show a strong correlation between deprivation and lack of pupil mobility. Put in simpler terms, the middle classes tend to be the ones who travel to exercise ‘school choice’. The poor tend to stay put and go to the nearest school.
Sadly, some Catholic and Church of England schools have played a most un-Christian part in this process. Independent research has consistently shown that a significant number of faith schools operate overt, or covert, selection policies, that effectively exclude the majority of local children.
The PF news story, ‘Little school choice for poorest children’, confirmed this. In inner London overall, nine out of the ten schools with the lowest percentage of local pupils were religious schools. They had an average local intake of 22.9% and an average eligibility for free school meals of 13.7%. By contrast, schools that take a majority of local children tend not to be religious; they also take a much higher percentage of children on free school meals.
In human terms, this translates into a pernicious hierarchy, particularly in the big cities. Add to this the growing number of schools that take children from only one world faith and we are witnessing a US-style segregation of children along class, ethnic and religious lines. These developments obviously promote neither social cohesion nor social mobility: the other shibboleth of the educational world.
For many then, the real battleground in education is shaping up between choice and fairness. On the one side are those who recognise that choice severely limits fairness and inhibits genuine social cohesion. On the other are those who care less about fairness (or the link between schools and social class) than about social mobility for the talented few.
Even here, the choice agenda has failed, with social mobility grinding to a virtual halt in recent years. Even the Conservative party had recently to acknowledge that grammar schools are now largely educating middle-class children rather than providing pathways to success for the deprived.
David Willetts, who gave an incredibly thoughtful and careful speech on this issue, lost part of his portfolio for his pains.
Brown has the chance to take a new approach and promote genuine social mobility along the way. But it will require rare political courage, in part to lay out a new vision of state and schools that goes beyond increased funding, better discipline, curriculum reform and personalised learning, important as these all are. (And severe public sector pay restraint will not help here.)
But the biggest challenge is the least glamorous one: to create a genuinely fair admissions system, to make sure that all schools take their fair share of local children across the social and academic spectrum.
The revised admissions code was a good start but needs careful implementation. Admissions policy is a complex minefield, but our education system depends on hammering out, and holding to, a fair system. Has Brown’s government got the Balls to pursue it?
