Examination of Witnesses (Questions 510
- 519)
WEDNESDAY 12 NOVEMBER 2003
DR SHEILA
LAWLOR, MR
MARTIN JOHNSON
AND MR
NICK SEATON
Q510 Chairman: Could I welcome our
witnesses to this session. It is very good of you to give of your
valuable time. I am sorry we have overrun the first session a
little, but it was excellent value and so we had to keep a few
more questions flowing. I think you will know—I know Martin
Johnson was in at the last session listening—that we have
had a whole year for our main inquiry, apart from all the other
things the Committee does, and that has been looking at secondary
education. This is the last phase in that. We are looking at school
admissions policies. It is the hottest issue, the most difficult
issue probably, of the five topics we have looked at. We are very
grateful that you are with us today and we would very much like
to hear from you. We have an admissions policy in this country.
We have particular problems in some areas of the country, particularly
London, and there has been a lot of evidence about the special
conditions in London. Could I invite you, first, to say a couple
of words to introduce yourselves and then to say what you think
of the current state of the admissions policy that we have. Is
it perfect? If it is wonderful and it is not broken, should we
not leave it alone? Or does it need a radical overhaul? If you
can do all that in two or three minutes, I would be very grateful.
Dr Lawlor: My name is Sheila Lawlor
and I am director of a think tank called Politeia. Thank you very
much for inviting me. I will try to summarise my thoughts in about
two minutes, if I may. I think the schools admissions policy we
are operating now and the one which is planned under the new Code
of Practice is essentially a very dishonest system. I think it
is dishonest because it is designed to give the impression of
choice but that choice is a chimera. The system where you had
central or local government allocation of places, on the whole
remains, except for those schools which are their own admissions
authorities. We have a familiar model of central planning. We
have seen it in other countries in economic terms, the Soviet
Union or China, Five-Year Plans, Great Leap Forwards, but in this
country we are not willing to say it is essentially a centrally
planned model with no real choice. Because the two main parties—schools
which are not their own admissions authority and the parents—are
excluded from this very important decision: the schools themselves
and the parents, in practice. This has disadvantages, I think,
for the schools' professionalism. We are trying to encourage schools
to take great responsibilities for teaching young people, and
in any teaching institution—and I speak as somebody who
has been in a teaching institution—one of the central marks
of its professionalism is responsibility for admissions; sensible
responsibility delegated. We are also undermining parental responsibility
because this is a vital area where parents are responsible for
their children. The aims of the system are many, but it is very
unclear what is the precise aim. If it is simply to make sure
that no child does better than another, it might be better to
close down all good schools so each was equally bad. However,
if it is to ensure—and it is an aim I share—that all
children, particularly those who are disadvantaged in one way
or another, have as good a chance of a good education as every
other child, I would say there are better ways to do it, Chairman.
This, at heart, is a problem really of ideology. There are two
ways of running a school system. There is the centrally planned
model, with admissions authorities, admissions forum, criteria,
an adjudicator, an appeals panel and the secretary of state and
the LEAs, or there is a free system of choice, where parents would
apply directly to a school and the schools would admit or not
the pupil. In my view, the best way to help disadvantaged children,
in fact all children, is to have a choice model, so that, where
good, schools will get better, and poor schools will too get better.
Because, in the end, I think we have played around with a system
which in one way or another has been collectively planned and
run, with many laws, constant change, fresh admissions criteria,
fresh bodies to supervise the appeal, a system which lacks transparency,
clarity and accountability. In the end I would say that it is
better to have a free system really because I would go along with
John Maynard Keynes who thought it was better to get things "roughly
right than precisely wrong".
Q511 Chairman: I take it that you
are not content with the present system!
Dr Lawlor: No, not at all.
Mr Pollard: Very perceptive of you, Chairman.
Q512 Chairman: Martin Johnson?
Mr Johnson: Thank you, Chairman.
Good morning. As you will have seen, I come from quite a long
teaching background and a trade union background, but I have been
a researcher with the IPPR for nearly three years and rely very
much on evidence as a basis for policy making. I think the weakness
of the present system is that it veers too much towards the concept
of education almost as a consumer good, in that it appears that
the only parties with an interest in school admissions are schools
and parents. Education is not a consumption good; it is a service,
offered by the state for all kinds of economic and social reasons.
Therefore, there are a large number of stakeholders in the education
service: the state, as I have said; the community, because schools
perform community duties; as well as the parents, the schools
and the pupils themselves. We at the IPPR do not think that the
present system represents that range of interests as well as it
should.
Q513 Chairman: Thank you. Nick Seaton.
Mr Seaton: Thank you, Chairman.
I am Chairman for the Campaign for Real Education, which is a
pressure group mainly consisting of parents but about one-third
of our supporters are teachers. We press for basically higher
standards and more parental choice. I think most people accept
that there are not any perfect solutions about admissions. It
is a difficult area. But also people get very concerned by moves
to undermine parental choice in favour of compulsory social and
academic mixing. Encouraging youngsters from less privileged homes
is a noble ideal to be applauded, but it should not be done by
discriminating against others. Nor, I think, should the Government
restrict the freedom of law-abiding citizens. Almost all the problems
with admissions occur simply because there are too few good state
schools. That is the great problem, I think. I think the Government
and ministers need to decide: Is the aim equality of opportunity
or equality of results? If it is equality of opportunity, why
undermine the best schools?—as in Gloucester, the grammar
schools—and I have a particular interest in the grammar
schools. Is it compulsory social mixing? Is that more important
than parental choice? If so what rights have politicians, whether
local or national, to deny parental preferences? There is a huge
debate about what exactly is social inclusion. By all means, encourage,
as I said earlier, youngsters from less privileged homes to move
up in the world and get a good education—that is fine—but
why should schools have to accept someone who disrupts everyone
else? Why do they have a right to be included? Why is there no
great fuss in other countries about selection? I think it is basically
because they have good technical schools and so on which are popular
with parents, so, if youngsters do not get into the most academic
schools, they still get a good education, leading to good jobs.
How can church schools and faith schools accept all-comers, as
the Government is suggesting? Surely that destroys the school's
whole purpose. Or is it just the intention to use the title for
political purposes?—to give, as Sheila said, the impression
of parental choice, whereas in the end all schools will be the
same. I think the system at the moment is not working well. The
emphasis is going too much toward State-control at both national
and local levels and basically cutting out parents. We get quite
a few complaints from parents. They are very sad cases, where
youngsters are being forced into schools that their parents do
not want them to go to simply because the LEA has an awkward catchment
area or it wants to boost the performance of a poor school or
something like that. It seems to me that the key point is, as
any good manager would say, "If you want to boost the performance
of a whole system or a business you leave the ones that are doing
well to get on with it and put all your efforts into improving
the less good." You do not start to tinker with the ones
at the top and undermine the ones who are doing well in order
to supposedly help the ones at the bottom. It just will not work.
Apart from that, there are not the resources or the people to
do it.
Q514 Chairman: We have had evidence
given to this Committee—to take the London example, following
the Greenwich decision on which schools will take which pupils
from outside their area—that you no longer have the notion
of community schools, certainly in London and possibly in other
areas like Bristol and Leeds and so on, the big cities. Has it
not been the case, though, that it is almost impossible to have
a good social mix because schools no longer can serve their communities?
The community does not go to the school that is nearest to them.
Indeed, in London people travel vast distances in order to go
to school. How has that Greenwich decision, in your view, affected
the nature and quality of our schools?
Mr Seaton: Basically, I think
most parents will go to their local school if the local school
is a decent school. That is really all they want. It is common
sense that the less distance the children have to travel, the
better. But if the local school is a bad school, then they will
travel. They do need choice, and if you deny that choice you are
just making an excuse for the poor performers and weakening the
high performers.
Q515 Chairman: Sheila Lawlor, what
is your view, post-Greenwich.
Dr Lawlor: If parents are to have
any opportunity to find a good education for their children without
having to pay through the nose—and I think the figures in
London are nine to 10% of parents are now educating their children
independently, which is ahead of the national average—I
think it is important that you can have the cross-border traffic.
We are publishing a piece by the assistant director of education
at Wandsworth, and in his borough they have 6,000 pupils into
Wandsworth from surrounding boroughs. It does not offer them particularly
more problem or less problem, but it is important that we do preserve
the role of the parent, so I would welcome anything which encourages
such choice rather than restricts it.
Q516 Chairman: You celebrate the
freedom that the Greenwich decision gave parents.
Dr Lawlor: I am not really a celebrator
of anything about the system, Mr Chairman. I am sorry.
Q517 Chairman: Interestingly enough,
when you said there is this deep unhappiness, other evidence the
Committee has had already suggests that if you are an articulate,
middle-class professional living in London and you can play the
system, it works very well for you and you can get four or five
choices of school. If you are less articulate and less knowledgeable,
you will end up with one or sometimes no offers of a school.
Dr Lawlor: I think this is a problem
with how the system is. If one were to move to a choice-based
system right through—so that, at the end of primary school,
the heads of the primary schools worked with the parents to help
advise on a good choice of school where they really did have a
chance, where they had connections, and where they could advise
the parents and the family and where there was greater freedom—I
think this would work. I have sat with heads in, say, Paris, and
in Paris, in admitting pupils, where the pupils apply, there is
an element of selection by the school, there is no doubt about
it. But it is not a dirty word. It is a very open system, where
the rules are always bent in order to encourage the children,
partly those who live in the catchment and partly those who are
able[3].
It is a system, I think, which is working better because you have
that element of choice and cross-border traffic.
Mr Johnson: Actually, I would
not overemphasise the importance of the Greenwich judgment, in
itself, as a single item. After all, it only affects people or
largely affects people in areas where there are a number of small
urban LEAs. If you look at London, which is, I have argued in
my paper, unique in many ways, the Greenwich judgment came only
shortly after the abolition of the ILEA, and of course there was
cross-borough travel, a considerable amount, in the time of the
ILEA. The Greenwich judgment, in London, really allowed the continuation
of that traffic. Of course we do have, as I am sure you are aware,
lots of examples where schools are located close to the borders
of LEAs. Their natural catchment area, if I can put it that way—and
that is not an unproblematic concept, as we have heard earlier
this morning—is derived as much from a different LEA as
from their own.
Chairman: We are into the subject now
and Jonathan would like to ask a question.
Q518 Jonathan Shaw: Thank you. I
would like to ask Sheila Lawlor, you have made your criticisms
of the admissions system abundantly clear to the Committee and
you have said a school should decide whether to admit or not the
pupil.
Dr Lawlor: Yes.
Q519 Jonathan Shaw: Should there
be any guidance from government/LEA at all, particularly for children
in care?
Dr Lawlor: We have the law of
the land which, as it stands, to my mind is too top heavy and
too prescriptive right down to the bottom, but there must always
be a legal framework to protect the interests of those who need
to be educated. It is how we administer, how we define such a
framework—where we can draw the lines and how we administer
it.
3 Note by witness: It is an open system where
the rules are always bent in order to encourage the children who
live outside the catchment area, not inside the catchment area,
and partly those who are able. Back
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