School Admissions Process

Kate Osamor Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Kate Osamor (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of the school admissions process.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck—for the very first time, I believe.

I applied for today’s debate not only because the topic is of national importance, but because of the issues that my constituents have brought to me in recent weeks. Two weeks ago, the parents of one boy in my constituency came to me, beside themselves and at their wits’ end. To protect the identities of the child and the family, I will call the boy John.

John used to attend one of the schools in my constituency. He was on track, he played football and he learnt judo, but after his mock exams things went downhill and he started misbehaving. Eventually, he was sent to a pupil referral unit and excluded for three months. John’s father told me that during those three months, he essentially became another person: he was arrested and charged for robbery and he received a community service order.

John kept trying to turn his life back around and had a job for a year, but his parents saw him withdraw. It soon became clear that he was caught up with a bad crowd, with drugs and with gangs. In July last year, like other vulnerable children in Edmonton, he went missing. John was assaulted and only came back to his family four months later. He now faces another court case. His parents say that he stays in his room. They fear that his mental health is dwindling fast and that he might harm himself. John’s parents do not excuse the things he has done, but they love their child. They want him to be safe, and they wonder whether things could have been different had the school not excluded him so quickly.

Sadly, the story of John and his parents is not uncommon. It is being repeated all over the country, time and again. All across my constituency, parents know a simple truth: whether, how and where a child is admitted to school, and whether they are excluded from it, can set them on very different paths in life. In recent months, growing numbers of parents have come to me, saying how hard they are finding it to access decent school places in Enfield. Across the borough, we are losing too many vulnerable children to crime and gangs. Our pupil referral units and the wider education system are failing them.

The lives of those individuals affected are ultimately why today’s debate matters so much. I called for it because I know many hon. Members who are not here today but who, had they been able to attend, would have scrutinised with me the schools that this Government have built. The Government have now been in power for the past decade, and I hope that the Minister will back up his defence of their record with firm evidence.

Let us look at some of that evidence. Today, the Sutton Trust released an important new report assessing inequalities in the schools admission process, called “School Places: A Fair Choice?”. It finds high levels of socioeconomic segregation across schools and a marked gap in academic quality between schools attended by poor and by non-poor pupils. We often hear the argument that better-off parents are just more proactive about getting their children into good schools. The Sutton Trust research demonstrates that, in fact, parents across the socioeconomic spectrum make choices based on academic quality. The report found that those families eligible for free school meals make as many choices as richer families about the quality of school and about whether to choose a local school.

The report concludes that it is the school allocation system, rather than parental preferences, that means that children of wealthier families do better. In other words, inequalities in schools admissions exist because of how places are allocated, not because of how parents choose. The Government have based their whole education policy for the past decade on the mantra of promoting choice, but it turns out that it is the supply side of schooling, not the demand side, that is the problem.

On the supply side of school places, the arguments are well rehearsed. On this side of the House, the Labour party favours universal equal access and creating more high-quality places. We said in our last election manifesto that we would consider proposals for integrating private schools into a better state school system. We said that we would end the fragmentation and marketisation of our school system by bringing free schools and academies back under the control of the people who know them best—parents, teachers and local communities.

Let us be honest: parents feel there are not enough good places for children. According to the latest figures published this week by the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, the number of children being home-schooled in England has just risen by 13% to 60,000. The real number may be much higher. I ask the Minister whether the Government accept that in many parts of the country there are simply not enough high-quality school places available for parents to choose from, and what steps the Department is taking to correct that.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

One simple change that would help to create a sufficiency of places would be for the Government to allow local authorities to build schools directly again. There is a lack of schools, the process now to create new schools is difficult and schools do not always get built in the right places. Local authorities, as admissions bodies, know where the schools are needed.

[Kate Osamor]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important point; I shall express my support for that later on in my speech.

The new research from the Sutton Trust also highlights the perverse incentives of school accountability systems that have developed under this Government. Both league tables and the Ofsted system encourage too many schools and academies to take on advantaged children and ignore disadvantaged children in the interests of scoring highly. I ask the Minister whether this new Government will look again at the incentives in our school accountability system.

The Sutton Trust has today made important and considered new proposals for making the schools admissions system fairer. They include marginal ballots, expanding the use of banding tests, prioritising applicants eligible for the pupil premium and simplifying conditions for demonstrating religious observance for applicants to religious schools. Will the Government say today what they make of those options, and will they commit to examining them closely?

The incentives that our Government set for schools matter, not just for admissions but for exclusions. The scandal of off-rolling, whereby schools still willingly exclude pupils too quickly just to improve their academic performance, is appalling. The Government must end it once and for all. Will the Minister consider making schools accountable for the outcomes of pupils who leave their rolls and removing the perverse incentives that let pupils such as my constituent John fall through the system?

I will conclude with a note of caution about the illusion of choice that the Government are giving people. Just this week, the schools admissions watchdog released figures in its annual report showing that in the past year, two out of every five complaints it received were about access to grammar schools—but those complaints were from privileged parents about grammar schools enrolling disadvantaged children. Any parent will know that people want the best for their child, but I am extremely concerned that the reintroduction of selective grammar schools under this Government is encouraging support for inequality. It is giving only an illusion of choice, and we need to ask ourselves whether it may be turning parents of advantaged children against disadvantaged families, who are being blamed for the lack of good school places.

I worry that the Government have introduced competition among parents without creating the new school places to go with it and are passing that off as “choice”. That is turning society against itself and dividing parents and communities. Should we not be putting all our efforts in this country into strengthening our whole public education system and creating high-quality new places, rather than encouraging a brutal race to the top for a lucky few while letting others, such as John, fall through the cracks? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on securing the debate and on her excellent opening speech.

I listened carefully to what she had to say, and she said that there are not enough high-quality school places in our system. I have to say to her that we have raised the proportion of schools graded by Ofsted as good or outstanding from just 68% in 2010 to 86% today, and in the period between May 2010 and May 2018 we created 920,000 more places in our school system. We have also changed the admissions code to allow schools to prioritise in their admissions arrangements, their over-subscription criteria, children who are eligible for free school meals, those who qualify for the pupil premium, so there are incentives on schools to actively seek children from disadvantaged backgrounds. That is particularly the case with the pupil premium. It pays £935 per pupil in a secondary school and £1,320 per pupil in a primary school. And of course in the national funding formula we allocated significant sums to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In relation to the school admissions system, only about 1% of schools are referred to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, which administers the school admissions system to ensure that they are fair. Anyone can object, if they think the admissions arrangements are unfair, but only 1% of schools are referred to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator. In her annual report, Shan Scott, the chief schools adjudicator, said that it was

“an admissions system that as a whole works effectively in the normal admissions rounds and that in those rounds the needs of vulnerable children and those with particular educational or social needs are generally well met.”

We are concerned about children in need who are known to social workers and seek their support. That is what our review of children in need was about. Our forthcoming changes to the school admissions code focus on in-year admissions and the fair access protocols, to ensure that they work better for the most vulnerable children, including children who have been excluded.

Our system is producing more good school places, which has been the thrust of everything that we have done with our school reforms since 2010. The academies programme has been at the heart of this Government’s reforms. Today, over 50% of pupils in state-funded education study in academies, the number of which has grown from 203 in 2010 to over 9,000 today. Our vision is for a world-class school-led system, which gives headteachers the freedom to run their schools in the way they know best. We believe that the academies programme can provide opportunities for that through its key principles: autonomy, accountability and collaboration. Therefore, we do not agree with Labour’s policy to bring academies under political control or with its hostility to the free schools programme.

Some 75% of sponsored primary and secondary academies that have been inspected are now good or outstanding. Those are sponsored academies, which are schools that have underperformed for years. Only one in 10 of those schools were judged good or outstanding before they became sponsored academies. Pupils at those schools are getting a significantly better quality of education thanks to that academies programme.

Through the free schools programme, this Government have funded thousands of good new school places and opened schools across the country, and we are committed to delivering choice, innovation and higher standards for parents. We want it to challenge the status quo and drive wider improvement, injecting fresh, evidence-based approaches into our education systems. Free schools are created to meet the need for pupil places in areas that need them and to address the concern about low- quality provision.

[Kate Osamor]

The Minister says that the Government are providing enough spaces for parents and their children. If there are enough spaces of high quality for all parents, why has the number of children in home schooling gone up by 13%?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Osamor]

The Minister did not answer all my questions. Is he prepared to receive a letter from me?

[Nick Gibb]

Or we could meet.

[Kate Osamor]

I appreciate that. It is a very important issue to my constituents. I am sure that I will speak to the Minister about admissions again.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the effectiveness of the school admissions process.