Memorandum submitted by the Socialist
Education Association (SEA)
The Socialist Educational Association, the only
educational association affiliated to the Labour Party, welcomes
this opportunity to comment on the White Paper "Higher Standards,
Better Schools for All".
While we approve of many of its proposals, for
instance some of those on extended schools, personalised learning,
providing education for excluded pupils after their sixth day
of exclusion, promoting good health, and school discipline, and
welcome the proposal to encourage private schools to abandon fees
and selection and the recognition that "fair admissions"
means balanced intakes, we believe its main thrust is inimical
to the promotion of comprehensive education and the continuance
of a well-resourced education service; conflicts with the hope
of collaboration over the 14-19 agenda; and was not part of the
manifesto which Labour put to the nation in May 2005. We see
no evidence for its assumption that a diversity of provision and
a variety of providers will raise standards.
The White Paper claims to be centrally concerned
about parental choice, but it fails to recognise that parents
are only going to be able to exercise a preference and what most
parents want for their children is a good local school. It should
be the responsibility of the Department of Education and Skills
to ensure that this is provided. If a school is deemed to be failing
its pupils, it is pointless to close it and further damage the
education of children attending it; but the LEA does need the
means and resources to turn it around quickly while keeping it
in the local community of schools. The Department has powers to
see this is done without "bringing in educational charities,
faith groups, parents and community groups and other not-for-profit
providers to run schools' (White Paper 1.30) We need to be alert
to the needs for social inclusion and not allow social and religious
division to be extended in our schools. The proposals to provide
advisers and transport for disadvantaged children are too dependent
on their winning a place in the school of their choice and will
not help them play a full part in the life of their school.
It is no answer to allow "popular"
schools to expand and less popular ones to wither away to the
detriment of those pupils left in them. This will only undermine
the Government's efforts to improve standards in all schools.
Children transferring to a popular school will lead to a loss
of income for their local school, a reduction of the curriculum
on offer and staff looking elsewhere for promotion. It is likely
too that as a consequence the local school will be left with a
higher proportion of children with special needs and from poorer
families which will only exacerbate the "failing school syndrome".
We are alarmed at the proposal to end the role
of LEAs as providers of education; we believe this would remove
a vital defence which schools have had over the years against
any central government moves to cut educational expenditure. Many
of us remember between 1979 and 1997 how it was LEAs of all political
complexions which resisted, often successfully, the Thatcher government's
policy of reducing the public funding of education. It is our
responsibility to see that we have a system in place which could
cope with any future Government which might not have the determination
of the present one to adequately fund our public education service.
It also removes a layer of democratic accountability
for which proposals for Parents' Councils, however welcome, do
not atone; parents' interest in schools is by definition limited
to the time their children are of school age and to the particular
schools their children attend. As citizens we all have an interest
in how our schools are performing. We are aghast at the proposal
that local authorities should no longer be able to provide new
schools as even the White Paper recognises the local authority
"has an important insight into local knowledge" (WP
134) No one is arguing for local authorities to be "interfering
in the day to day running of good schools" (WP 1.34) but
they can and do provide valuable systems of local advisers, training,
interschool networks, economic supplies and support for less advantaged
schools especially primaries. They are the only bodies able to
take an overview of the organisation and effectiveness of schools
in a limited area of the country which they know well and for
which they are democratically accountable.
But it is the proposals for the setting up of
Trust schools each acting as its own admission authority which
we find most repugnant. Even if we had a rigorous admissions code
of conduct this would still produce a system which would be impossible
to monitor and likely to lead to widespread abuse as schools compete
for intake in order to improve their league table and test positions.
With the present code which is not mandatory it would mean an
abandonment of any pretence to have a fair admissions procedure.
Moreover, the White Paper although it claims
"there will be no return to the 11+", fails to deal
with the yawning lacuna of existing selection. There is no mention
of the 10% of England (not Scotland, Wales or even Northern Ireland
now) which still operates the 11+ and brands 70% of its children
as failures at that age, and consequently creams another 10% of
the country adjacent to it with a comprehensive schools system
of some of their most able children. We find it completely inexplicable
that the Prime Minister should condemn the education system in
the past for only being concerned about educating the top 25%
("We must never concede the politics of aspiration for all"
Guardian 18.11.05) while ignoring the fact that that system
still operates in large swathes of the realm such as Kent and
Buckinghamshire which certainly do not produce those "all-ability
schools that retain the comprehensive principle of non-selection"
of which the Prime Minister speaks in his Foreword to the White
Paper. Statistics show that this system is socially and ethnically
divisive, totally repugnant to both the Government's drive for
social cohesion or the desire to relieve congestion on our roads.
Further the White Paper has no proposals to deal with the widespread
selection which exists by aptitude, faith, post-code and fees.
We call upon the Select Committee to be robust
in its examination of this White Paper and its proposals for which
we discern no widespread demand by parents and which if enacted
could fundamentally and "irreversibly" alter our system
of education, fragmenting it, destroying its defences and the
balance of local/national responsibilities. We firmly believe
in a publicly administered and coherently planned education service.
Does the Government want to leave it open to the new barbarism
which sees education as one area of public service ripe for exploitation
by market forces?
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