Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2003
PROFESSOR ANNE
WEST, PROFESSOR
JOHN FITZ
AND PROFESSOR
JOHN COLDRON
Q40 Mr Pollard: On this issue, Chairman,
I am very interested in the catchment area concept. I like that.
In my own constituency, St Albans, we have 1,600 secondary school
places and 900 local kids. Therefore, all our kids ought, in that
case, to be satisfied and they are not. About February/March time
my surgery is full of parents coming along and belly-aching that
they are having to taxi across to wherever it might be. We have
two fee-paying schools, three voluntary aided schools, one single
sex boys, one single sex girls, and it makes the concept of a
catchment area really difficult. Would that fit in? Is that workable?
Professor Fitz: I am not sure
how to answer that.
Q41 Mr Pollard: We have a good LEA
as well. There is no question about that.
Professor Fitz: I think that raises
this question of parental risk again. How do you play that system
if you are a parent confronted with that? What do you do? Do you
go for single sex schools because their results are slightly better?
Or is it because there is an ethos and your religion demands you
really should attend there? It comes back to the point I raised
earlier, really. That is the issue about parental risk. I do not
know how you play that system.
Professor Coldron: That is just
an example of the unmanageability of admissions, I think. The
managers of the LEA, well all the admission authorities, do a
fantastic job really to get anybody placed in that situation.
The softly-softly answer would be that the admissions forum would
eventually come to an agreed arrangement which was much more amenable.
The more hard-edged approach would be to say, "No, impose
a single admission authority."
Chairman: Let's move on. Kerry, you have
another bite in terms of the admissions process.
Q42 Mr Pollard: Fantastic, Chairman!
What factors influence parents decisions about school choice?
Could I just give an example. I have one new estate built in my
constituency. There are 50 children on this estate, 49 girls and
one boy, and it is adjacent to the girls' school. Parents are
making a choice there by where they live. What influences parents'
decisions?
Professor Fitz: How long is a
piece of string? Let me try to pull together what the direction
research seems to suggest. I suppose there is about 20 years research
on this now in which Anne and I, and John in his own way, have
actually been involved. It is not what you might think. Things
like school performance are there but not at the top of the list.
It is often a sense of what we might call "happiness"
but happiness being an index for a whole range of other things.
It is about where parents and children think they will be secure;
for example, it may well be they would find a girls school amenable
because it has a range of possibilities and an ethos which they
find attractive. That is certainly one. In that basket of things
which we call "happiness" security tends to be at the
top of the list. How they go about choosing, of course, is an
equally complex process, but the bus-stop and the grapevine are
very powerful influences here rather than the cold calculations
of what the school performance was like and what the exclusion
rates are and so on. All our research would tell you that parents
driving past the school bus-stop and looking at the behaviour
at the school bus-stop is actually a powerful indicator of how
the school sits. There is a whole range of things there. That
is where I would say the research has pointed in the past. There
is no reason to think why that is not the case now.
Professor Coldron: I would reiterate
that it is a complex decision. You cannot isolate one item and
say that is more important than another. When we talk to parents
and ask, "What is the most important item?" They say,
"Discipline. But of course it has to have a good academic
performance, and it has to have this and that." So it is
always a composite. But, if you are talking about items, academic
performance is always mentioned by parents (about 43%), discipline
and nearness. So there are practical considerations.
Q43 Jonathan Shaw: Is discipline
is the same as saying about safety?
Professor Coldron: Yes. It is
a very complex concept. We have actually talked to parents about
that and tried to disentangle what they meant about discipline.
And there is a moral side to it, the way that you think people
ought to behave. The way you think people ought to be disciplined
within a community. There are work practices—you know, "They
are not made to do their homework there." It is about dress—"I
would not send my child to school where there were children wearing
that kind of thing." "Skirts up to here," was one
comment. The important thing is that it is what you would expect:
it carries all our moral and prejudicial weight that it would
if we said "discipline".
Q44 Chairman: You have not mentioned
race.
Professor Coldron: No.
Q45 Chairman: In terms of research,
does the racial mix in a school influence decisions on parental
choice?
Professor Coldron: In all my interviews,
over 10/12 years, I have had no parent saying that they explicitly
did not want a child to go there because of race. That is, I think,
hiding what they considered to be attitudes that they should not
reveal to me as a researcher. So I do not have any evidence about
the level of influence that racial intake has.
Q46 Chairman: Even our Committee's
evidence in Birmingham showed, for whatever reason, vast movements
based on this kind of environment—particularly Asian parents
who wanted their daughters to go to girls' schools, with this
enormous movement around the motorway system of Birmingham in
order to achieve that. I do not think we have to be naive. Not
to understand as constituency Members of Parliament that the reputation
of a school in terms of ethnicity does not come up in formal research,
but certainly I notice that the fact of schools which have a reputation
for a certain racial mix changes parents' behaviour.
Professor Coldron: Certainly the
idea of a segregated school for boys and girls would have an influence
on certain groups' opinions about which schools they wanted to
go to. I would say that class and socio-economic status is perhaps
trumping ethnicity in terms of their choice of schools.
Q47 Mr Pollard: Do you mean clæss
as opposed to class? The school in my constituency that
has vacancies—and there are but 10 in the whole of the area—has
a lot of Bengali children there. Like you, I have never had one
parent admit to me it is because there are Bengali children there.
It just will not happen at all. "I'm not a racist."
You will not get any of that. Are all parents equally well placed
to navigate the school admissions process?
Professor West: In my view they
are not. My view—and this is a view—is that some parents
are going to be adept at working the system and deciding what
is needed from a particular school, contacting the school when
their child does not get a place and so on. I think that is likely
to be the case—highly likely to be the case.
Q48 Mr Pollard: Is that a subjective
view?
Professor West: It is a subjective
view.
Q49 Jonathan Shaw: Ah, you would
not answer my question!
Professor Coldron: I worry about
this one.
Q50 Chairman: Why do you worry about
this one?
Professor Coldron: It is quite
clear that people will come to decisions of any kind with very,
very variable resources. But the idea that some parents do not
know what they are doing . . . I am not accusing Anne of that,
but there is a certain sense of: "Well, working class parents
just cannot manage this process, they are always going to find
themselves in the rough end." I think there has been a danger
in that. So, yes, there are quite a lot of parents who come who
simply cannot manage this process—there is a lot of material,
at its most formal end, as it were, going through all the Ofsted
reports and everything else—but they do know what they are
doing in terms of the over-subscription criteria. Most people
do. About 3% do not, and most of those would be the ones with
the least educational qualifications.
Professor West: I would like to
add to what I have just said by saying that they are also better
able to navigate the system because they are able to make better
statements saying why their child has specific needs to go to
a particular school and so on. It is along the lines of that.
They might be more able to get the relevant reports from professionals,
if that is what is needed. If that is not needed—in some
cases these reports are not needed—they are better able
to make a case for their child actually to go to a particular
school, and that is in addition to how they might then find out
in advance what is needed and what the likelihood of their child
getting into a particular school is. So it is a mixture of subjective
and objective, I think I would say.
Professor Fitz: Could I just read
you a little piece from an admissions part of it which is very
interesting. This is an LEA. It says you have a designated school,
"You may, however, prefer your child to attend another school.
. . . If you wish your child to attend a school other than the
one designated to serve your area, you will need to complete the
relevant parental preference form"—where you have to
set out your case. I think I would share my colleague's view:
some parents are simply more able to do that than others. I have
had a look at one or two of them and you have a page like this
to make the case. You have, in my knowledge, some people who are
able to cite the Rotherham judgment in making their case—you
know, "This is my first school" and so on—and
others who simply say, "If I've got to make a case, I can't
do it." That document asking them to make the case does actually
differentiate between parents' capacity to respond to official
forms.
Q51 Mr Pollard: Is there a case for
parents who are less mobile—mobile in the sense of being
able to move about—being disadvantaged?
Professor Coldron: They have more
choice if they have more economic resources. Yes, that is true.
May I just make two other points. Our work on appeals suggests
that parents do not have any better chance of winning their appeal
according to whether they are from one social class rather than
another.
Q52 Mr Pollard: There is evidence
for that?
Professor Coldron: Yes, in our
work. The other point is that there is no doubt there are certain
obsessive individuals, and this comes out in lots of people's
research. It is quite remarkable, the amount of effort that some
parents put into it. Whether that gives much of an edge for the
amount of effort they put in, they are certainly piling personal
and financial resources into this effort, and they are all of
a certain group—what one would call "middle class".
So, yes, that certainly happens. Whether it gives them much of
an edge . . .
Chairman: I suppose if parents think
they are deciding, if they cannot get a school of their choice,
that they will alternatively pay for private education, the relative
sums might be quite small.
Q53 Jeff Ennis: We have made mention
in earlier contributions of the PISA study and the fact that overall
the UK came out pretty well in that. The one characteristic which
was of major concern was "the long tail of underachievement".
Are the current admission arrangements in this country exacerbating
or continuing that long trail of underachievement in your opinion?
Professor Fitz: My colleague Stephen
Gorard is talking about the long tail of achievement tomorrow,
I think questioning the idea that there is such a long tail. I
think that is one of the arguments emerging.
Q54 Jeff Ennis: Did you say he questions
it?
Professor Fitz: Yes.
Q55 Chairman: Who questions this?
Professor Fitz: Stephen Gorard,
who gave evidence at the first session I think. He is working
with Emma Smith, who I think gave evidence last time. They are
presenting a paper tomorrow or the day after which raises some
questions about whether that tail is long in comparison with other
countries in the PISA study.
Q56 Chairman: We would very much
like to see that.
Professor Fitz: You may wish to
see that[14].
It raises questions about whether or not the tail is certain as
we think it is.
Q57 Chairman: We have just had the
published information on school achievement and pupil achievement
showing 25% of the population leave school with hardly any qualifications.
That is not a tail of underachievement?
Professor Fitz: That is a tail
of underachievement, no question. I think they are looking at,
in relation to other, say, competitor countries or to other comparator
countries: Is this a long tail? That is the argument. It is much
more a question as to whether we are doing better or worse than
other countries. That is the question. If you wish to say 25%
leaving with qualifications is a long tail and an unsustainable
situation, I would perfectly agree with you. I do not have an
argument with that. It is the comparison. I think that is the
issue. It is hard to know where school admissions would fit into
this, because that "long tail", as it were, is driven
by lots of other factors as well: parental attainment, levels
of income and so on. I would think school admissions is a very,
very small part in retaining that—a part but a very small
part. The other drivers are probably socio-economic. That is,
I think, our take on this.
Professor Coldron: I would certainly
reiterate that we must not forget other issues—and they
are very, very important—like poverty and so on but I think
admissions do have a part to play, and that is that we know pupils
in less segregated schools do better overall. If admissions could
do anything about reducing segregation, then it could do something
about reducing that tail. I think the issue of resources (that
is, resources following the harder to educate children) would
do quite a lot in terms of de-segregating schools. It would take
away some of the pressure for schools to select. It might begin
to even out some of the intakes and therefore take some of the
pressure out from polarisation for parents. But it would also
provide more resources to that tail exactly where they are intended,
not through initiatives which are away from the child. They would
follow the child and they would have a great deal of effect on
the morale of teachers within those schools as well. But that
is not quite admissions. That is a long way from admissions, but
it has an effect. It is all tied up with the same issue. I think
there is a case there for admissions having something to do with
raising that tail.
Professor West: I would agree
with that as well. I would also like to add to this idea of additional
resources going to certain categories of pupils. To some extent
that does already happen with fair funding but in some LEAs, to
varying extents, it is actually determined at a local level. If
one is going to go down the market-oriented model—which
is what we have at the moment, a quasi market—then I think
that may well be a way to try to redress the balance. I think
one could argue that others might say, "Is that necessary?
It should not be necessary," but it could, if you like, be
an extra carrot to try to encourage schools that are their own
admission authorities to take some of these harder to teach young
people, so that they are not so concentrated in certain community
schools, for example. I think there is a possible role there.
Q58 Mr Pollard: On the issue of appeals
being an indicator of dissatisfaction, in your paper, Professor
Coldron—and we have already mentioned this in earlier evidence—it
is more a metropolitan or urban problem than it is a rural problem.
Indeed, in paragraph 2.4 of your paper, you say, "There is
indeed a crisis in school admissions, not globally but in
particular localities. For LEA admissions managers in deeply polarised
areas it presents extreme difficulties in achieving coherent regional
schools provision." Is it a crisis in your opinion in those
localities? Can it be described as a crisis that needs to be dealt
with?
Professor Coldron: I think so.
I think it comes close to a crisis in the way that you talked
about in St Albans. I think London has very, very extreme difficulties
in different parts of it, so, yes. I mean, I was being slightly
polemical there, in that for the individual parents it is an absolute
crisis, but, equally, for those other groups, particularly those
who are vilified as being rough schools and so on and there is
a stampede away from them.
Q59 Chairman: Do we have a uniform
view, right across the evidence we are getting this morning—this
is the sense I have—that some sort of banding system, where
you have a balanced intake in schools, would be your preferred
option if that could be secured.
Professor West: My view is that
that could be one option in certain parts of the country. Actually
to try that in a rural area, to move in that direction in a rural
area, would not be appropriate, because I do not think it is necessary
and I do not think one wants to intervene unless there is the
necessity for intervention. I think some form of banding, organised
at a local level not at a school level, would be a very strong
option to consider. Under the current School Standards and Framework
Act, the banding, where it is carried out at school level, is
carried out on the basis of those who apply to the school, and
those who apply to the school are not necessarily representative
of that area. They could all be higher attainers, for example,
and so it is not really what I would consider to be a form of
banding that is actually going to help reduce social segregation.
14 Note: See www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/equity. Back
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