Schools: Admissions

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on securing this debate. I declare my interest as a governor of King’s College London Mathematics School, which is a state-funded school for 16 to 19 year-olds, sponsored by my university and employer, King’s College London. I have therefore had first-hand experience of struggling with the construction of admissions codes that can be clearly understood by potential parents and students.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Knight, I found myself agreeing with just about everything the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said. However, I would like to say a little about the nature of the information that is provided to parents. The complexity of that information seems to be a problem in and of itself. There is a very real danger—I will duck the grammar school question, which would just make it even more complex—that in responding to perceived problems we will actually end up increasing the complexity of the codes and the fact that parents are faced with more and more information that they cannot really cope with.

Because it is not my own experience, I have been struck by the perception of many people that schools are already trying to manipulate their criteria in such a way that they are in fact selecting parents. For example, John Dunford, who was once general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, believes that some schools are making it as opaque as possible for parents in order to maximise the chance that those schools will receive fewer applications from children from poorer homes. As I have said, that is not my personal experience in any of the schools that I have had to deal with, but from this very complexity comes the perception that these rules are very hard to understand and that, when it comes to appeals, it is much easier for middle-class and educated parents to know how to appeal and to do so successfully.

I hope I will be able to persuade the Minister that the answer to this is not more and more complex codes. That would be a tempting and easy route to go down but my own experience, which has been borne out by many other people who have tried to create all-singing, all-dancing, totally transparent codes, is that that is not something that works.

Both noble Lords who have already spoken have alluded to the fact that we are in a system of school choice. Obviously, you get rid of admissions problems if you simply allow the state to decide where every young person should go. Personally I am not in favour of that, but if you have a system in which you have oversubscribed schools, as is very likely, you essentially have two options: either you use a lottery or you have rules for deciding who gets a place in an oversubscribed institution. In fact, we have some experience of what happens with lotteries because Brighton and Hove tried it out. The experience was an educational one, in the sense that it was a field day for the researchers, but it was also rather depressing because the reality was that it did not improve access. That was not the result, partly because they did not go for a complete city-wide lottery, which might have resulted in practically every child in Brighton and Hove having a long journey to school.

The experiment also made it clear that many people do not find lotteries fair. There is a perfectly good case for lotteries not being seen as fair because, first, they do not take account of the strength of preferences and, secondly, they do not make it possible to take account of individual circumstances. That is the crux of my point. The reality is that when you are faced with a problematic set of decisions, which school admissions are, either you can try to have automatic algorithmic rules or you are thrust back on decision-making, discretion and judgment. It is very tempting to feel that bureaucratic rules that you cannot get around, where there is no room for discretion, must be better and fairer. However, the experience of human beings is that all too often this is not the case. You have to choose between the possibility that sometimes people will not exercise their judgment correctly and fairly and the certainty that if you have a system that does not allow you to take account of the unexpected, the problematic and individual circumstances, you will always have situations in which a decision is seen by those affected as unfair and unjustifiable. That is just the way life is, but it has tremendous implications for how we might respond at this point.

Schooling is becoming more and more important; more and more parents take seriously where they want their children to go, therefore the issue of oversubscribed schools will get more rather than less acute. There are good reasons for feeling that it will be easier for the educated and the privileged to deal with this. As I said, I argue that the answer is not more and more rules. In preparing for this debate, it was interesting to look at what the previous schools adjudicator said about the current situation. You get the impression that the whole thing is a catastrophe: at least half the schools in the country are breaking the code.

However, when you look at the details, you find two things. I have tremendous sympathy with one of the problems—and anybody here who is a school governor and lives with this calendar of policies and things that have to go up on the website will sympathise. A large number of problems are caused by schools that do not do what they are directed to do because they did not understand that they needed to do it. I do not mean putting up your admissions criteria—clearly, that is important. As an example, a school might have decided that it will just go on doing what the local authority did; the local authority decides to change it, the school does not have a meeting of governors at which it deliberates and decides, and therefore it has broken the code. That sounds so silly that one does not need to take it seriously, but it is important to understand that many violations of the code are of this sort.

However, there is also the very real complexity issue, which I will concentrate on for the last couple of minutes. The adjudicator points out that in many cases you have complex arrangements and over-subscription criteria that are difficult to understand. It is also the case that just about every sixth form out there is in contravention of the code. That is because once you get to that point, there are complex decisions to be made. It is not like admitting somebody to a completely standardised primary school curriculum: you have to make decisions, not just about the number of students in your school but whether or not you will have viable numbers. Do you end up with a set of students and end up abolishing certain key A-levels because you were not allowed to take any account of whether or not the students you accepted would create a viable group, which might be the only group in that city which was offering that A-level? In the current situation, unless you are a special school, like a mathematics school, you do not have any ability to balance out these very real dilemmas. I argue that when you have a code that everybody breaks, which is the case for the sixth forms, maybe the problem is the code, not the sixth forms. When everybody breaks something, maybe there is a real problem.

There have been a number of occasions in the past—for example, national vocational qualifications—when Governments have believed that you could create a set of rules so clear that anybody, trained expert or not, could come along and say, “Okay, this one has passed—that one has not; this one goes in this box—that one goes in that box”. The reality of experience in every case is that we cannot foresee all the circumstances that occur—we cannot foresee the future—therefore in any complex situation we have to allow some room, or some slack, for human discretion and judgment.

In conclusion, I hope that the Minister will do a great deal to support parents. However, I urge him in doing so to look at procedures, access to help and, above all, simplifying rather than further elaborating the current code and requirements.