Schools: Admissions

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on securing this important debate and on his contribution. I agreed with pretty much everything he had to say, which often happens, but not always. In particular, when I talk about the relationship between parental choice and those with disadvantages, I will echo some of his points.

I start, however, with the new Prime Minister’s commitment to social mobility, made in her first speech outside No. 10. She said that Britain should be,

“a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us”.

I thought that not only would that have been a nice thing to hear a Labour Prime Minister say going into No. 10—they could easily have done so; it sounded a bit like the “for the many not the few” rhetoric used so much by Tony Blair—but that it was a positive sign of her commitment to education.

Parental choice, which is what this debate is about, is designed to improve the quality of education for everyone. The notion is obvious: if you give parents the power of the market in accountability terms, you can improve schools because they can use their choice to go somewhere else—with per-pupil funding, the consequence will be that schools sort themselves out. We know, however, that this does not necessarily work. I represented a rural area in Dorset when I was in the other place, and in the chunk of my constituency in the Purbecks you basically had no choice. You had to try to get your child into the local secondary school because the distance you would have to travel otherwise was, for most parents, prohibitive.

There is, moreover, an assumption that parents will choose on the basis of standards. That is also not always the case. When I was doing the Minister’s job, I recall being particularly frustrated that there was a Catholic school in the east of England that was doing appallingly in examinations but had full rolls. It was oversubscribed largely because of an influx of Catholics from Eastern Europe who wanted to send their kids to the nearest Catholic school. They were exercising their choice but not necessarily in the way the policy intended. So we have to have some caution about parental choice.

The best recent discussion of evidence that the disadvantaged find it harder in an environment of parental choice is in the department’s own analysis, published in January 2014 and authored by Rebecca Allen from the Institute of Education and Simon Burgess and Leigh McKenna from the University of Bristol. They conclude:

“The evidence suggests that what parents look for in a school may vary by social class: middle classes tend to value performance and peer group; lower SES groups may look for accessibility, friendliness of staff and support for those of lower ability. This may lead lower SES groups to select themselves out of high performing schools to avoid possible rejection or failure. Disadvantaged families (by definition) have access to less in the way of resources, which may limit the range of schools which they can consider due to transport costs. More affluent families tend to have access to higher quality information on schools and be more adept at using it. The publication of performance tables and Ofsted reports aims to level the playing field in this regard, but cannot generate informal knowledge of local schools”.

That sums up all of the reasons why support for parents in navigating schools’ admissions arrangements is really important. We have to try and replace that lack of informal knowledge that more advantaged and better networked people have. How many local authorities now offer a choice advice service? As I recall, this was introduced in the Education and Inspections Act 2006, a piece of legislation that I inherited from my predecessor Jacqui Smith when I was a schools Minister. It all passed by in a bit of a haze, but I think that piece of legislation brought it in. It is a very useful service. I had a quick look today at the council websites for the London Borough of Barnet, Nottingham and Redcar and Cleveland. Those authorities clearly have active sites with active advice and are employing people to try to help families in their areas. I would be interested in how much of that sort of service still continues, given local authority cuts and how effective it is.

It is also important to think about how we might develop more peer-to-peer networks so that families from communities that are successfully navigating the complicated picture of different schools’ admissions policies can to some extent be like the expert patients that we have sometimes had in the health service. They are to some extent the expert parents. Can more be done on what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said about the use of data? We can then enable private and third-sector smartphone app developers to develop solutions to make it really easy for parents to show their preferences on transport, as well as standards and faith and all the different things that weigh on parents’ minds when they have the anxious experience of deciding which school to choose.

It is really hard for parents to select schools. It makes me want to ask—this is just about relevant to the debate—why we might want to make it easier for schools to select parents. It is really important that we have a tough admissions code. It is really important that we create as level a playing field as possible for parents so that schools are not going out to choose them to make their job easier in the high-stakes accountability that we have in this country.

It is equally important that we do not extend selection. My parents benefited from a grammar school education, as a result of which my father became an accountant. He joined the professions without going to university. My mum was able to join the banking profession. As a result they were able to afford to buy me and my brother the privilege of an independent school education and we were then the first in our family to go to university. At one level, you could say that is a great story of social mobility, but they were the lucky 25% at a time when in the economy there was perhaps a logic to letting 75% go and work in factories or marry those who worked in factories. That logic no longer persists because we now have a very different economy from the one in which the grammar school system was designed. We need to move away from education being used to sift people and being more about an education than a schooling system. I know the Minister is committed to empowering every single child and helping them achieve the best of their talents. Writing off too many through a selective system does not do that.

I also point to the work of Professor John Hattie from the University of Melbourne, who says the data from all the studies around the world show the two things that work are great teaching and what Carol Dweck would call a growth mindset. How do you develop a growth mindset in a bunch of kids who feel that they failed at the age of 11 and no longer have any life chances? No wonder Alan Milburn, the social mobility tsar, calls it “a social mobility disaster” and the chief inspector a load of “tosh and nonsense”.

I cannot help but be diverted to say in the context of this debate that we must not go back to grammar schools. I do not know what sort of information you would give parents in the context of a selective system, especially once their child had failed. If the Minister wants to answer that, I would be most grateful.