Lord Desai
Main Page: Lord Desai (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Desai (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Watson for having asked this Question. I also declare my association with the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society, so I am in a gang of three, at least.
Before I start my remarks, I first say that this afternoon I went to the funeral of my friend Lord Peston, who was a great fighter for equality in education. He ran the campaign for comprehensive schools all his life. I pay tribute to him for the work he did.
I was associated with the campaign for state education way back in the 1970s and early 1980s when my children were going to school. It struck me at that time, and has struck me ever since, how much a battle of class education in England is—I do not know much about Scotland and Wales. I can see the anxiety of the middle classes to secure the best education for their children, an education that is not only the best but one that is better than the rest, as it were. The anxiety is very high, and a lot of pressure is put on schools and their admissions systems to secure that with things such as streaming, advanced courses for some children and so on.
The situation has got much worse than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. I sent all my children to the local comprehensive school and they got their first preference. Now, talking as an economist, there is an excess demand for school places, and because in each local area not everybody can get their first preference, there is rationing. When there is rationing, it puts power in the hands of the supplier to impose conditions. They are free to do some selective screening, if it is legal. We are witnessing two interesting things. Without a doubt, faith schools are popular not only with people of that faith but with people of other faiths or no faith. If they are oversubscribed, they have the power to ration according to the criteria they would like to impose. What we are saying—partly based on the idea that education is very important for life chances, as my noble friend Lady Massey said—is that we should prevent discrimination from the beginning because, once you do it, the situation will become worse. To the extent that schools are exercising this sort of rationing, they ought to comply with the admissions code. It has to be legal. We cannot allow people to do illegal things just because there is excess demand for places. We have to be very careful not to let them pass by and let this sort of discrimination fester.
The most important of the many objections that have been stated is the issue of equality, which is central to this debate. After all, the Equality Act was passed in 2010, not all that long ago. If you adhere to that Act, discrimination on the grounds of race or gender should be fought very hard. Obviously there are more Christian faith schools than non-Christian faith schools but there may not be the same imbalance in terms of students; there may be more students of non-Christian faith in a particular locality than of Christian faith. As the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, mentioned, the Cantle report was based on unrest in areas of the north that have large Muslim populations. One of the issues was a lack of integration of the local population, especially of young children, in the social and educational life of the community.
So these are not just idle matters that atheists bring up. This is nothing to do with atheists, humanists or secularists being unhappy about faith schools. Faith schools can be there; that is fine. They are good and people like them, and I believe in consumer choice. However, we cannot allow tactics of rationing that are not merely illegal but unfair. If we let them pass by because of pressure from some lobby or other, we and our children will pay the price, so it is important that we stop this as soon as possible.
The Government have said something about vexatious complaints, and both my noble friends have spoken against it quite sharply. My view is this: if you do not let us complain, what alternative are you offering that would do the same job? What can you create by way of a complaints authority that would allow people to complain without necessarily having to reveal their identity and make it easy for them to be able to complain? Do not make it too complicated; set up an agency that would receive objections from anyone who was unhappy with an admissions process, and let that agency take it up.
If the Government are quite happy to appoint an agency then that is all right, but they will have to find a substitute for the job that the BHA and the Fair Admissions Campaign have done. If they do not find such a substitute, they are being unfair both to the students who are suffering and to the people who are genuinely trying to get a better and fairer admissions system in schools. Then we would have to have a check on whether the objections that had been raised were fair and, if so, who would take up the matter. Of course the adjudicator that is there could do it. Ideally, I would prefer that all civil society groups, whether humanist or not, should be allowed to do the good job that the BHA is doing because it is doing it for the good of the education system.
There is also a matter of free speech. To prevent someone from doing charitable work just because they do not have faith is a violation of free speech, but I will not go into that as it is an entirely different angle.
The Government have to give us an answer. If they do not like the vexatious complaints that we make, what alternative are they offering to the parents of the children who are suffering? How quickly will the complaints be dealt with and admissions procedures improved so that these sorts of defects are not there? That is something that the Government ought to deliver, especially if, with regard to the previous debate, they are serious about encouraging some sort of equality of outcomes in people’s lives. To repeat what the Cantle report said, for social peace and harmony we need satisfaction with local education systems among parents, especially those who are in deprived circumstances and could not necessarily access middle-class facilities. These are important issues, and I invite the noble Baroness who will answer from the Dispatch Box to take them up.
Lord Desai
If there are more complaints, have more staff to deal with them. What is the problem?
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
What we also want to do is free schools from bureaucracy where possible, while of course making sure that they abide by the rules and are able to focus on delivering high-quality education. We want the adjudicator to be able to focus on the concerns that local parents might have about the admissions arrangements of a school they may genuinely wish their child to attend. That is why we have announced our intention that local parents and local authorities should be able to refer objections about a school’s admissions arrangements.
Let me be clear: this change does not mean that we will ignore concerns raised by campaign groups. These groups can, and do, raise their concerns directly with government and we will continue to encourage that. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, that it is helpful to have others’ views on how schools’ admissions systems are working. I assure noble Lords that officials from the department meet organisations such as the BHA regularly. We welcome the constructive relationship that we have and want it to continue.
We do not believe this change will have a negative impact on compliance with the School Admissions Code. In spite of the large number of objections referred by campaign groups over the past two years, it remains the case that most objections are referred by parents and local authorities. I am aware that concerns have been raised that parents do not have the expertise necessary to refer objections to the adjudicator—but, as I have said, given that a significant proportion of objections that are received now are from parents, this does not seem to be the case in reality.
We want parents be able to refer an objection where the admissions arrangements of their local school feel unfair or wrong to them: for example, if the boundary of a catchment area seems to be have been drawn in such a way as to leave out a particular street, or if admissions arrangements lack key information parents need to be able to understand how they will affect them, such as how “home address” will be defined.
Parents do not need a detailed knowledge of the admissions code to be able to spot such flaws—but, of course, if they felt they wanted to seek the advice of a group or organisation in referring an objection, they would not be prevented from doing so. Again, this change is about supporting parents.
Admissions teams in local authorities, who we intend will still be able to refer objections, have a detailed understanding of admissions law, and they have a legal duty to refer an objection to the adjudicator if they believe that a school’s admission arrangements are unlawful. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, said that the onus would be just on parents. No, local authorities will also have a role. They may be more likely than parents to spot some of the more technical issues which the noble Lord raised, such as failing to include an effective tie-break.
I know that there is also a concern about widespread non-compliance among faith schools—a number of noble Lords mentioned the report, An Unholy Mess. That report was based on a small-scale sample confined to just 43 schools, so it is misleading to say that it is representative of the faith sector as a whole, which comprises some 6,800 faith schools. Of the 43 sets of arrangements that were reviewed, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator found that most of the issues were not related to faith. There was also an issue with the methodology, which did not examine non-faith schools as a comparator.