Opening up our comprehensives

My latest Sutton Trust post looks at the drive to encourage more schools to use ballots in their admissions policies.

This week, the Sutton Trust revived the argument for school ballots as a way of admitting a significant proportion of places to popular urban schools. Of course, it is not an uncontroversial idea, but it seems the best and easiest way to introduce some fairness into a system where our highest performing comprehensive schools and academies are more socially segregated than other schools in their area.

After all, the evidence suggests that low and middle income students do better academically and socially if there is a mix of students from different income backgrounds in a school.

When I was Tony Blair’s education adviser, in 2005, I still remember the Times front page when they picked up our plans to allow ballots – random allocation of places where a school is oversubscribed – and fair banding across all abilities to achieve a comprehensive intake. The Times chose to illustrate banding, a move designed to achieve a comprehensive intake, with an 11-plus exam paper. The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, became convinced that we were planning a return to grammar schools and took some dissuasion on the point.

I tell this story because ballots, a simpler measure without any tests, have their own perception difficulties. Most newspapers prefer the term ‘lotteries’ which has obviously negative connotations. But it has also been confused by the Brighton system, which allied some very tightly defined catchment areas with ballots to assist some families losing out under a traditional neighbourhood system. The losers were unhappy, and the winners stayed silent, and the way the catchment areas were drawn meant little change to social segregation.

Yet, less arbitrary catchments can work. Some academies have been quietly getting on with it. After I did the Today programme on Monday, Liz Sidwell, the former schools commissioner and a dynamic former head of the Haberdashers’ Hatcham Academy in South London, tweeted to remind us that her school uses a mix of neighbourhood admissions and a ballot, splitting the two components 50:50. With huge local popularity for the school, this clearly makes sense. It’s the sort of model that the Trust would like to see more widely.

On Monday, we also highlighted another South London academy, Platanos College in Stockwell, a ‘converter academy’ where nearly 60 per cent of its pupils receive free school meals, yet 80 per cent of all its pupils gained five good GCSEs including English and Maths in 2012, including 77 per cent of those on free school meals. Platanos uses banding, whereby a proportion of places are allocated to pupils of low, medium and high abilities to ensure that it takes a good mix of students.

And although the Department for Education keeps quiet about it, academies and other schools that are their own admissions authorities – around two thirds of all secondary schools are in that category with a surge in converter academies – are allowed to use fair banding or ‘random allocation’ within the statutory admissions code, though the code bans local authorities from using ballots (Code, pages 13-14). Some academies may also give preference to pupils entitled to free school meals, just as all schools are required to do for children in care. (Code, page 10, note 22).

Balloting is neither as unpopular with parents nor as rare as some suggest. Earlier polling by the Sutton Trust showed that almost as many parents backed ballots as a fair oversubscription criterion as proximity to the school, when given those two options for popular schools, with a majority making it the better option for faith schools. Moreover, research by RAND Europe for the Trust showed they are used in other countries, including for admissions to US Charter Schools and Swedish free schools and universities.

Yet the reality is that the vast majority of comprehensives still admit on the basis of proximity to school, or an often ill-defined definition of religiosity in the case of faith schools, where ballots among members of a faith would be less arbitrary.

Doing nothing should not be an option. Our research shows that the proportion of pupils from low income families, as measured by free school meal take-up, which is a measure of the social mix of the school, at our top 500 comprehensives is less than half the national average.

More significantly, 95 per cent of the top 500 schools take fewer pupils on free school meals than their local average.  Of the 16.5 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals, just 36 per cent of them gained five good GCSEs last year, compared with 63 per cent of other pupils.

With higher house prices close to good comprehensives and academies, the bottom line in England is, as Sir Peter Lampl put it on Monday, how good a school you go to depends on your parental income. This applies from independent boarding school fees to inner city school catchments. A significant number of comprehensives and academies are not academically selective, but are socially selective because of the neighbourhoods or faith communities they serve.

Covert selection needs more than covert permissiveness in the Code. Ministers should actively encourage popular schools, particularly in urban areas, to consider ballots or banding. That way we could have a fairer – and more comprehensive – school system. Unless our best schools are open to all, we will never improve our low levels of social mobility.

Gove's schools 'revolution' needs to be more than a rhetorical numbers game

Last week the Government unveiled its new Admissions Code with further fanfare about its supposedly revolutionary potential. There are a few useful changes, and the odd perverse one. It makes sense to combine a permissive attitude to the expansion of good schools with the opportunity for academies and free schools to prioritise pupils on free school meals (though why voluntary-aided church schools are excluded is not explained). The Schools Adjudicator may not be able to investigate concerns off his own bat, but will now cover Academies and must respond to complaints from anybody, not just other admissions authorities. Oddly, area-wide lotteries are banned, though banding stays and schools may run their own independently-supervised lotteries; again, a change lacking logic but seemingly based on one study of the Brighton experience, which was in reality as much about addressing middle class grievances as reducing social segregation. Parents have a bit longer to appeal against admissions offers and teaching staff can be prioritised in school admissions policies even where there are no shortages.

What is remarkable about the code, besides the admirable sub-editing job performed on its overlong predecessors, is how much it retains of that which Labour introduced. In reality, most school admissions will continue to place priority on distance and siblings, while new selection is still outlawed, and the coalition must hope that enough free schools are established and that the improvements of the last decade continue apace so that dissatisfaction in urban areas with admissions is reduced. But of more importance to their stated priorities is the extent to which the new Code linked with the pupil premium, school structural reforms and changes to accountability combine to improve social mobility.

And, on that, the jury is still out. The rhetoric has certainly been bracing, and the Government's media cheerleaders have become over-excited at the pace of academy conversions. But there are a number of important issues that need to be addressed if the rhetoric is to affect reality on the ground.

First, the pupil premium is too low this year at £430 per pupil to make much difference, especially as schools are coming to terms with other budget cuts. The premium should reach £1600 by 2014-15 and may then have a bigger impact, but a lot will depend on how schools are held accountable for its results. The league tables may include measures of achievement and progress for poorer pupils, but it will be the value attached to such measures in the Ofsted inspection framework that matter most: the new league table measures will not greatly affect parental choices in themselves.

Second, the structural reforms are certainly a victory for advocates of greater independence and diversity - I would certainly count myself as one. But with a few admirable exceptions, most of the 40 planned free schools will do little for the poorest students, however much they satisfy middle class or religious parental aspirations. And most converter academies are converting so for financial reasons. There is little sign that the DFE is using Michael Gove's initial commitment to ensuring strong system leadership from the new academies, within funding agreements for example. Meanwhile, the Government has diverted time and effort to the legal process of academy conversion from the far tougher job of turning around failing schools, even though the £25,000 grant available to converters should cover their legal costs. It insults the intelligence to pretend that the hard grind needed to turn around or replace failing schools is comparable to the fairly simple, financially persuasive and legal process required for successful schools, and without the same drive that Andrew Adonis brought to sponsor-led reform, there will not be the gains that were made by Tony Blair's Academies. Liz Sidwell is making a good start as Schools Commissioner, but the DFE effort as a whole needs to focus on the hard rather than the easy wins. Inputs are not the same as outcomes.

And finally, the changes to the Admissions Code are, understandably, permissive. But the pupil premium offers a chance to use some leverage. Prioritising poorer pupils in successful schools could be one of a menu of possibilities linked to a higher premium in the future. As could becoming a National Leader of Education, or successful curriculum innovation. But without some conditionality, the pupil premium is in danger of being a damp squib. Unless it does so, the Treasury will start to question the value for money in continuing to raise the level of the premium at a time of austerity.

The coalition has made a lot of noise about social mobility. It has ostensibly put some money where its mouth is, with the pupil premium. But it has not - as yet - joined the dots of its various policies to ensure that it makes the impact it says it wants to see in the results achieved by the poorest pupils. It must start to do so.

A brave and sensible move on admissions

Today's Daily Telegraph reports that Michael Gove is planning to give academies and free schools the right to prioritise pupils entitled to free school meals for admissions, where it can help give them a more balanced intake. I'm not sure why a school wishing to achieve this would do so rather than going for banding or random allocation, but it is nevertheless a brave and sensible move that could help social mobility particularly if the pupil premium becomes anything more than a few hundred quid of sticking plaster for the cuts.

The Telegraph, needless to say, regards the whole thing as 'social engineering', which one supposes is not the same as buying a house in the catchment of a good school in order to gain admittance. I remember when Tony Blair was considering extending the Admissions Code to allow more banding, as well as extending choice for those entitled to free transport and the introduction of choice advisers, the Telegraph was equally sniffy. But those changes were right and necessary, especially as academies expanded, and many do use banding or lotteries. Ironically, it was a Times report on banding - where pupils are tested so they can be placed in different ability bands to achieve a comprehensive intake - that caused some very senior Labour figures to imagine that the 2005 White Paper was about increased selection. It didn't help that the Times placed an 11-plus paper on their front page to illustrate the news.

The simple fact is that good schools need objective measures to avoid becoming socially selective. It is extraordinary that some so-called comprehensive campaigners equate easy access to one's nearest school with fair admissions. With a heavily oversubscribed school, it is nothing of the sort, though it is sensible to have a balance between a neighbourhood catchment and one that is wider and more accessible. Equally, it is not enough to open school admissions up in this way. Choice advisers need to be developed in the way they were originally intended, as advocates from communities where people are reluctant to travel to good schools rather than local authority employees (though some of the latter do some good work, to be fair). Parents need active encouragement to apply.

The Telegraph report suggests that the new measure will be permissive, which is also probably sensible, though schools are required to prioritise children in care in their admissions policies. However, it is to be hoped that there is a degree of positive encouragement to good schools in urban areas in particular either to adopt this preference or to use banding or random allocation for at least a proportion of their intake. With some academies having 11 applicants for every place, it is the only fair way to ensure a more equal intake. That is not about social engineering. It is about enabling genuine opportunities for social mobility.

Schools must be able to recruit poorer pupils

I've written this piece for the Public Finance blog:

The education secretary, Michael Gove, is reported to be considering a change to the Schools Admissions Code that would allow successful schools actively to recruit pupils entitled to free school meals from outside their catchment area. The change has been greeted with predictable shrieks of ‘social engineering’ from the right-wing media and claims by the Margaret Morrissey, who runs an organisation called ‘Parents Outloud’ that it would ‘shunt’ parents to ‘the bottom of the list.’

But Gove is absolutely right to look for ways to ensure that new academies and free schools – which are more likely than Labour’ academies to be in better off areas – are not simply ghettoised by the middle classes. Poorer parents are too often already ‘shunted’ to the bottom of the list by virtue of where they live. The fact is that the use of catchment areas as the main admissions criterion by urban schools ensures that many of the best schools exclude poorer pupils not because they go out of their way to do so, but because they simply cannot afford to live near enough to the school to get in.

With the 2006 Education and Inspections Act, the new School Admissions Code made it easier for schools to combat this by introducing either ability bands or random allocation (lotteries). A growing number of academies use this criteria – often within a wider catchment area than the neighbourhood around the school – to ensure a balanced intake. In fact, middle class families can benefit from this too, as the Brighton experiment showed (in that case, catchments were drawn largely for their benefit), since it at least gives them a chance of getting their child into a school otherwise closed to them. Those who can lose are those who have moved into an artificial catchment area to get into a particular school, though it makes sense for schools to provide a proportion of places for those living very near a school as well as a proportion that is open to wider competition.

Gove’s proposal would give schools another way of widening their intake, by allowing them actively to recruit poorer pupils, presumably by setting aside a number of places for those entitled to free school meals (FSM). There is a critique of FSM as the measure, in that it misses a lot of youngsters from families of modest means, but the principle is a good one. And if the new pupil premium - provided it is additional and significant – is to work, good schools must have more than an incentive to recruit poorer pupils, they need the means to do so as well.

That said, there are two other aspects of the 2006 reforms that need a shot in the arm, if this scheme is to work. The first is the entitlement to free transport to any one of three local schools (rather than that nominated by the local authority, as before). This needs to be better publicised, and must not be a victim of the Chancellor’s cuts. The second is the choice adviser. As I wrote last year, the idea of people actively helping poorer families to make choices has had a patchy record. But it could be revitalised as a Big Society idea, with successful people from poorer communities providing the advice at crucial times during the year, and active rather than passive efforts to promote good choices.

Of course, Ed Balls is right to point out that Labour’s academies, by being placed within poorer communities, are making a huge difference to many poorer families. But that doesn’t mean his successor is wrong to find ways to redress the imbalanced intakes of some of our more successful schools at the same time.

Choice advice needs to improve

I've written a column for today's TES arguing that more needs to be done to ensure that disadvantaged parents get better independent advice on school choice:

The chief schools adjudicator Ian Craig made headlines last month when he proposed a crackdown on parents lying to get a place in a good school. And Schools Secretary Ed Balls was quick to propose fines and other sanctions for the wrongdoers.

But they both appeared to ignore an equally worrying issue, even though it also featured in the adjudicator's annual report: poor choice advice.

Disadvantaged families have been missing out on the help they need to get their preferred school. This failure to engage the families who need the most support has grown apparent under Labour, but it also risks undermining the Conservatives' plans to open the system up to new schools.

Choice advisers were one of three measures introduced in Tony Blair's controversial schools white paper in 2005 which were intended to ensure that, as new academies and trust schools were established, they were accessible to children from poorer homes. Along with greater flexibility in free school transport (since 2008, it applies to a choice of three schools, not just that deemed acceptable by the local authority) and an admissions code that encouraged random selection or lotteries and ability banding, choice advisers were meant to be advocates for those without the pushy elbows.

Without such measures, parents might fall foul not only of fraud by other families, but also the inbuilt unfairness of an admissions system that too often reflects the size of the family mortgage. I was Blair's adviser at the time, and we always recognised that choice advisers should be wholly independent of the local authority; ideally they should include people drawn from the communities that needed help, including the white working classes and some minority ethnic communities.

I had been particularly struck, for example, by the success of a young Somali woman graduate in persuading Muslim mothers in a Bristol school of the value of their daughters continuing in education after their GCSEs. And I'd spoken to parent support workers from the voluntary sector who made a real difference to how parents related to their children's education in east London.

The good news in Dr Craig's report is that all but one local authority now provide choice advice. Moreover, many have linked them to other parent or family information services, giving them a degree of independence, though limited funds. And local authorities believe the advisers are doing a good job helping parents navigate the applications timetable.

The bad news is that the service is too often poorly targeted. As Dr Craig says: "Some (local authorities) have found it difficult to prioritise the most 'needy' ... consequently, those who would benefit the most have not necessarily received the level of support that they otherwise might, and the choice advice service is not maximising its contribution to fairness."

To be fair, the best authorities do inform people of the service, placing leaflets in supermarkets, children's centres and doctors' surgeries. Some have public sessions at shopping centres, and many are happy to visit parents in their homes.

But the service is inevitably hampered by time constraints and anxieties that suggest many of the advisers are not being drawn from the communities themselves. A significant number would not attend an appeal hearing, fearing "blame" if parents lost their appeal. A separate analysis by academics from Sheffield Hallam University, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, suggests that where local authorities used arms-length parent partnerships to deliver choice advice, rather than basing them in existing admissions teams, they received "more in-depth support and guidance", often including "repeated home visits" and joint school visits. The report said that when choice advice is well targeted and staffed, it can play a "small but important part in making the admissions process fairer and easy to navigate".

Critics of choice advice - and school choice generally - say it is a poor substitute for making every school a good school. It isn't - we need to do both. But even if that happens, some schools will still be better than others, and may offer different strengths or facilities. And with the academies programme being extended and Conservative plans to allow new providers to develop new primary and secondary schools, poorer parents will need such support more than ever.

Of course, not all parents will want to share the angst of the metropolitan middle classes. The Sheffield researchers noted that for many favouring their local catchment school, "accessibility and their child's happiness were more important than the educational performance of schools". Choice advisers can only advise them of their options.

Yet, while the middle classes make the most of what choices are available to them - including opportunities to work with new providers where there is dissatisfaction with local schools - it is vital that such advice is available, impartially and from trusted sources. Once parents have the advice, they must get the support they need if they want to apply beyond their local school.

But so long as schools only offer places to those in an immediate catchment area, the choices for many others will remain limited. A real success of academies has been in attracting a genuine social mix, either with banding or lotteries or because they are located in poorer areas. Other good schools should be encouraged to open some of their places up to a wider cross-section of families.

So, Ed Balls should do more to encourage all authorities to follow best practice and encourage genuinely fairer admissions. His Tory shadow, Michael Gove, should stop pretending that without the right support and open admissions policies, his plans for a Swedish-style system will do much to improve social mobility. Unless politicians get admissions policies and advice right, the poorest pupils will only enjoy Hobson's choice.

Selective statistics

Fraser Nelson also inadvertently demonstrates the fallacy of the attack in many papers today on the notion that more should be done to encourage bright youngsters with potential to aspire and apply to our elite universities. He publishes this table in an effort to show that comprehensive schools are rubbish.

Of course, what he ignores is the fact that a selective school chooses only the top 25% of pupils in a given catchment area - and often a tighter group than that given their paucity - so it is absurd to compare its exam performance directly with that of a comprehensive school, where though there will often by a 5 A-C at GCSE expectation for A-level groups, the cohort will be much wider in ability than a grammar or independent school. Without such weighting, the comparisons are pretty meaningless. He has also ignored sixth form and FE colleges for his comparison. When these are added in, a total of 14,893 students gained 3As from 'comprehensive schools' last year compared with 5,470 in selective schools and 10,680 from independent schools. Certainly still not as good as they should be doing, but the key point being made by the Sutton Trust is that pupils gaining 3As from state schools are less likely than those from independent schools to go to a top university.

And here, exam results aren't necessarily the biggest problem. It is the lack of ambition of students and some teachers in too many comprehensives. It is the failure to guide students towards the right subjects. And it is a lack of the sort of self-confidence and self-belief that often comes with a public school education. A growing number of comprehensives, including Academies, are starting to recognise this. Whether students might benefit from the allocation of scholarships to the best achievers in certain inner city schools or some recognition of potential beyond A levels - what is hilariously called 'class war' - matters less than whether they gain these attributes, and do so from an early stage in their secondary education.

The admissions dilemma

The Chief Schools Adjudicator, Philip Hunter, publishes his last annual report today. And already it has made plenty of waves with claims that half the foundation and faith schools in the country are breaking the law, and discriminating against poorer pupils. In fact, as one would expect from Dr Hunter, who has been a studiously fair and judicious holder of the post, the report makes clear that most breaches of the School Admissions Code were technical and when they were pointed out to the schools, they were happy to comply. The doubling in complaints largely reflects a legal duty on authorities to report breaches that they didn't previously report as a matter of course.

Most state schools are keen to attract a wide range of pupils; those that opt for more freedom from the local authority are no less so than others. But they don't always have the same resources to get it right first time. In any case, adherence to the Code is not going to produce any magic solutions: where schools give preference to those living closest and to the siblings of children already there, there will always be a bias of some sort. That's why some schools and authorities have tried to use banding - where places go to pupils of all abilities based on a reading test - or ballots - common in many other countries - to give parents without the means to buy expensive houses close to certain schools a fair chance. But they too are attacked in the media.

The truth is that no system can ever be perfect so long as there are some imperfect schools - and some schools will always be better than others, no matter how far reform goes. There's no point blaming heads of the best schools for that. Nor is there any merit in tinkering further with the Code. The leader of the Association of School and College Leaders, Dr John Dunford, is right when he says: "The last thing that parents and schools need is more tinkering around the edges. The government should give schools time to get to grips with this code, and should understand fully where the problems lie, before making changes to the code."

Are school admissions really such a lottery?

Once again, school admissions are at the top of the news agenda. The schools minister, Jim Knight (left), is chided for reminding parents who don't get their chosen school of their right to appeal (since over a third win on appeal, this is surely perfectly reasonable advice, even if school leaders don't want the paperwork). But what is less remarked is the extent to which admissions are less of a lottery now than they were when Labour was elected. For one thing, there are far fewer schools with poor results: Michael Gove may only have been in nappies in 1997, but in that year a full 50% of secondary schools had fewer than 30% of their pupils gaining five good GCSEs in English and Maths. Today, it is a quarter, and the numbers below 25% achieving any five grade C or above GCSEs or equivalent has dipped from over 600 to a couple of dozen, thanks to the development of specialist schools and academies.

Equally, there are far more comprehensive schools topping the 70%+ mark - over 600 now compared with 83 in 1997. And this has been reflected in the appeals figures, where the number of appeals (and their proportion of total admissions) has been falling significantly. In 2002/3, there were 50,200 secondary school appeals heard by an appeals panel; in 2005/6 this had fallen to 41,650; or a reduction from 7.2% to 6.1% of all admissions (appeals lodged fell from 10% to 8.3% over the same period; the difference reflects those that have been withdrawn); moreover the proportion of successful appeals rose from 33.5% to 36.4% over the same period. This suggests that about 4% of secondary parents don't get a school of their choice. Of course, it is higher in London and some other cities like Bristol, and not everyone can ever get their first choice of school; and the work to get more good schools must continue; but the facts suggest a rather better picture than the media are suggesting today.

Fair's fair?

Proof that the great Tory attack on poverty to be announced tomorrow by Iain Duncan Smith is so much hot air is provided by the news that plans to support fairer admissions to schools have been excised. There are only two fair ways to allocate state school places where demand exceeds supply, and academic selection is ruled out: banding, where places are allocated to pupils of different abilities after a test, and random ballots, both supported by the School Admissions Code. Ballots - dubbed lotteries here - are actually fairly common in the United States, Scandinavia and New Zealand. Here, many academies use banding to ensure a balanced intake. A key feature of Tony Blair's last schools bill and white paper was the promotion of school transport, choice advisers and fair admissions. Far from rejecting such ideas, any party serious about tackling poverty should be seeking ways to extend them. Of course, the public need to gain a better understanding of how they work - and the number of good schools needs to continue to increase - but the idea that good schools should only be open to those who can afford expensive houses nearby is indefensible. The ball is now in Balls's court.