News stories about school admissions have been high on the agenda this week, with reports from the Telegraph that 200,000 pupils don’t get their first choice place and Brighton and Hove City Council’s decision to give places at oversubscribed schools by electronic ballot or ‘lottery’.
In reading them I was reminded of Shaun’s story. The sociologist Diane Reay spent time with Shaun and his mum between 1997 and 2001. In 1998, Shaun had two years left in primary school. He was hard working, poor, white and working class, and had clear ideas about his secondary education. ‘I’m gonna go to Westbury because my mate Mark’s going there and my girlfriend … Sutton Boys’ is like one of the worst schools around here, only tramps go there.’
A year later, Shaun was not so sure. ‘I might not get into Westbury ‘cos it’s siblings and how far away you live and I haven’t got any siblings there and I live a little way out so I might have to go on a waiting list … I might go to Sutton Boys’ instead ‘cos all my mates are going there. Shaun’s head teacher, Mrs Whitticker, had told him that Westbury would be far too risky a choice as he lived on the edge of its catchment area. Shaun and his mother resigned themselves to applying to Sutton Boys’. Shaun’s mother was deeply disappointed, but she accepted the advice: ‘I could have wept at the thought of him going to Sutton, but what choice did we have, ‘cos Mrs Whitticker said we didn’t have any?’
Shaun’s story shows some of the problems with the current school admissions system. First, it offers those with the financial means to pay the house-price premium associated with living near a good school and privileged access to education, which is fundamentally unfair and leads to the socially divisive segregation of children along class lines. Working-class parents like Shaun’s mother are much less likely to be able to afford to move into the catchment area of the school of their choice. Second, the current system is unclear and complicated. As such it is open to what Julian Le Grand dubbed ‘middle-class capture’. The opaqueness of different policies for school admission and the differing quality of advice that parents receive in practice rewards the sharp elbows and strong arms of the middle classes, who are best equipped to push their children into the school of their choice.
So what should the criteria for school admission be? For Tony Crosland the principle was parental choice. As secretary of state for education in the mid-1960s, he argued that ‘parents must have the final decision’ over choice of secondary school. Today, choice must still be the first principle in the school admission system. Choice has intrinsic value of its own: it acts as a driver of standards and it helps give parents a stake in their children’s school.
But the best schools are a scarce resource. What criteria should we use when schools are oversubscribed? A couple of years ago the Social Market Foundation set up an internal commission to look into these issues. (The original SMF report is available on www.smf.co.uk.) The first response must be to allow the best schools to expand, while forcing up the quality of provision in those that do less well. But this takes time. In the meantime, how should the resource be rationed? There are a number of different values that could in principle be used – disadvantage, academic selection, proximity and so on.
When the SMF commission came to look how to rank these values, two issues kept occurring. First, any rules designed to rank values are in practice open to abuse by more privileged parents (and in some cases by schools). Second, even addressing this question in the abstract, the commission’s members could not find a way to rank these values amongst themselves and they certainly could not find a way to rank them that would be acceptable to all parties.
The solution therefore was that some form of procedural fairness was best. In our everyday lives, ‘chance’ is seen as a fair way of making these decisions – from the toss of a referee’s coin to the drawing of straws. Random decision mechanisms are the embodiment of fair allocation procedures. In this way, unwarranted personal characteristics – nepotism, money and power for example – that could interfere with the decision processes are excluded. The SMF supported a random ballot for admission to schools with oversubscribed places with good information available to all parents to assist them in their choice.
Brighton and Hove City Council’s decision this week to allocate places at some secondary schools in the area by electronic ballot is thought to be the first example of the policy in use in the UK. The decision split local parents and resulted in angry protests. It would be easy for government to shy away from this policy, but the consequences of procedural fairness in allocating school places could be exciting in creating a more socially just society. Education should be the great driver of social mobility. Instead, the system is manipulated and bought by people who can most afford it. As Shaun and his mates approach university age, what has become of them? What we can say is that with a fair procedural mechanism, such as a ballot, many of them could have had the opportunities granted to the children at Westbury and the very best schools in the area.