Schools: Admissions

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Lucas]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to support parents in navigating schools’ admissions arrangements.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, parents choose schools, or at least we make great efforts to give them that opportunity. Certainly I believe it is extremely good for parents to have that choice. They should have the chance to find the school that suits their preferences and those of their children and not simply be stuffed into whatever school happens to be closest to them. In my life outside this place as the editor of The Good Schools Guide I spend a great deal of time trying to make that happen. I feel and I think the Government agree that parents having a choice is good for the system as a whole. It is a slow mechanism. Parents change their views about schools and schooling quite slowly, but over time it works to improve the system and it certainly works to improve the relationship between schools and parents. When parents have a choice of school, that makes for a much better day-to-day relationship between parents and schools than was the case before when schools tended to shut parents out because they did not need their permission to exist.

In order to make a choice you need high-quality information that is easily available. It also needs to be accessible in the sense that it must be delivered in a form that enables parents to make sense of it without devoting their lives to doing so. Successive Governments have made great strides in this direction. Performance tables are now hundreds of columns wide and contain a great deal of data. Government websites are becoming ever more informative. The latest edition is just out and is a great improvement on the previous one, and no doubt we will see more of that. Apart from the occasional imposed idiocies—I am thinking of my great friend Nick Gibb and the noble Lord, Lord Knight —of excluding GCSE and similar exams from the data, it is pretty high quality and useful stuff.

The attitude of the department over the years has always been open and constructive. However, the one area where this is not true is information on admissions. Yes, it is available after a fashion. Local authorities publish brochures in physical or PDF form. They are all in different formats and do not by any means contain all the information they are statutorily supposed to show. Moreover, they are generally not set out in a way that encourages comparisons between schools and understanding what you as a person located in a particular place on the map with a particular set of circumstances have access to. As the fragmentation of the system has continued, the quality and availability of this information have declined. I know of only one organisation that makes a serious attempt to collect this data, which is 192.com, and indeed a lot of schools are simply delinquent about providing the data. The information is patchy even though it is the best that is available.

Availability also means accessibility, something that can be used to make decisions. Because the data is available only in PDF form, with no standard format within the PDF, it cannot be integrated in any way that helps parents to make decisions. That creates a complex system where, in somewhere like London, you have to look at several sets of data because people live close to local authority boundaries. You have an immense variety of catchment systems. Distance is measured six different ways, I think, in English catchment systems. There are feeder schools, selection or partial selection and multiple streams of entry.

The result is that the advantaged in society become yet more advantaged. They know enough, they know the people to talk to, they have the understanding to find out what opportunities are there, the schools that have ballots that they may take advantage of or understand how to navigate a banding system to their advantage—which band you want to get your child in to have the best chance of getting into Camden School for Girls, or whatever. The disadvantaged become yet more disadvantaged. Even the advantaged, who are the people I spend most of my life talking to, are full of anxiety at this uncertain, unclear, difficult-to-navigate process.

The Government could do something about it very simply and at very low cost. The data are all there. Every admissions authority knows its admissions criteria. They all follow a coherent structure and the information on how an admissions round has gone is not exactly complicated. If each admissions authority had to contribute those data to a common table and the table was then made open data by the Government, that would be all they had to do. The great gods in my world are the property websites. They command so much traffic that we all have to pay attention to what they want. They want as good a set of catchment information as they can get. If the Government were to make these data open, I and a multiplicity of other people would suddenly find ourselves having to spend large amounts to catch up with the market, and that would be no bad thing.

The cost to the Government would be the creation of a table and no more. The responsibility for the accuracy of the data would remain with those who put the data into the table. The benefits, apart from a general reduction in anxiety, would be a better quality of choices, particularly for the disadvantaged, because it becomes easier to give them something that they can use to understand their options and encourage them to look at schools that are opening their doors to them.

Something that some schools are trying, and which I really encourage the Government to consider instead of grammar schools, is opening some of their admissions to ballot rather than things that are gameable. Schools that do so find that they still get only the advantaged applying because the disadvantaged do not know how it works or even that they have the option.

To have serious information systems out there that made it easier to find out your chances of getting in to which schools would be really helpful in giving the disadvantaged access to excellent schools. Local authorities I have spoken to would also find that helpful. They are getting less and less complete information as to what is happening in admissions in their area because crucial data are withheld by academies. They are just a black box. You send them a list of people who have expressed a preference and back comes a list of people that the academy will accept. There is no indication of what process the academy has gone through; no data are flowing back.

If we are to pick up on the White Paper—I would be very happy if we did—and make local authorities the champions of parents, we have to provide excellent data. To have the data open and available would do nothing but good for the honesty of schools in the application of their admissions criteria, because every disappointed parent could see why they failed and whether that was fair.