Schools: Admissions

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Lucas]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will allow independent schools, particularly those which were formerly direct-grant grammar schools, to join the state sector on the basis of needs-blind admission.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)]

My Lords, the Government already allow high performing independent schools to join the state sector by submitting successful applications to become free schools. Free schools are independent state-funded schools that do not charge fees, must abide by the schools admissions code and are not able to have selective admissions criteria. It would therefore be open to the kind of schools to which my noble friend refers to apply to join the state sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am sad that my noble friend does not share my disappointment that, after so many decades of pontificating and after my right honourable friend Michael Gove’s speech on the need to rebalance the independent and state sectors, no party seems prepared to engage with an initiative from a trusted intermediary such as the Sutton Trust to take advantage of all the work done under the previous Government to improve the state system and relationships between the state and the independent sector and make a radical change to the balance between state and independent education. Can he offer no hope to the Sutton Trust in its ambition to make a change which will otherwise take 50 years on the best possible course?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I am extremely keen, as are the Government, to encourage as much co-operation as possible between the independent sector and the maintained sector. The noble Lord will know better than me the number of examples of independent schools working with the maintained sector in a variety of different ways—whether through involvement in the academies programme, coming into the maintained sector or providing courses for children at local maintained schools, all of which I thoroughly applaud. However, the main priority of the Government is to do what we can to raise the standards for the vast majority of children in maintained schools. That is the focus of the work we are doing.