It’s school admissions time again, and parents’ desperation that their child will be able to go to the school of their choice in 2010 is being heightened by the fallout of this year’s admissions round.
The Chief Schools Adjudicator has issued his report on those who lied to get into the best schools, Harrow Council has failed in its attempt to prosecute a parent accused of “cheating” the application system, and our new Supreme Court is hearing an appeal from the Jewish Free School in London against an earlier ruling that they can’t select pupils on the basis of faith.
Fiona Millar, an impassioned commentator in this area, was surely missing the point though when she suggested that “most schools aren’t failing, and most children with a supportive home environment can get a perfectly good education in their local school if it is …. good enough.”
It’s been a long time since the middle classes have been satisfied with ‘good enough’, particularly when it comes to education.
In it for the long game that is university admissions, parents see each move in this complex journey as utterly critical, and ‘good enough’ is never going to wash when ‘the best’ might have been an option. And of course, for many the credit crunch will have cut off the independent school escape route that they had been banking on in extremis.
So all in all, admissions next year will be more, not less, febrile, and if Ms Millar thinks that a “warning on schools’ admissions forms” about a Local Authority clampdown on cheats will really “help restore integrity to the system” then she’s sorely underestimated the level of angst in middle England – angst which will only be fuelled by threats of prosecution. If the problem is so bad we’re having to criminalise parents then it’s got to be even worse than we think, right?
When I was at the Sutton Trust we advocated the use of lotteries in school admissions, on the grounds that it would at least be truly fair, and that it might just provide the fillip needed to sort out the much abused catchment area system. Force middle class parents to engage with their second or third choice school and they’ll quickly make sure that bad becomes better and good enough becomes best, or so goes the argument.
The reality of a lottery can seem extremely unfair on an individual basis, of course, and as a parent the thought that my boys might be allocated to any school other than the village primary 10 minutes walk away fills me with abject horror. But I still can’t see any other way, in policy terms, of sorting out this unholy mess. Let’s all hope the Government can…
