Selective primaries

I've written this blog for the Sutton Trust website on primary school admissons.

On Monday, hundreds of thousands of parents in England will learn whether or not they have secured a place for their children at their preferred primary school. For many, that will be their nearest primary; for others it may be faith-based schools. For some, there may not even be places as the demographic birth bulge continues to impact on school place planning at a time when all new schools have to be free schools.

But behind the excitement and despair of National Offer Day there is a second story at play. The issue is not just one of school choice but also of educational inequality. Primary schools, even more than secondary schools, are already the subject of social selection, with distance from schools even more important with fewer recruits each year. Selection by house price is an inevitable – and probably unchangeable – aspect of a system where we rightly place a premium on being able to walk to school and minimise the dreaded school run.

Yet that’s not the whole story. There has been a lot written about admissions policies to secondary schools. Debate still rages about grammar schools, while Sutton Trust research has shown that many successful comprehensives could be regarded as socially selective. Rather less has been said about primary school admissions policies, yet the choices made at age five can impact on social mobility as much – if not more – than those made at age eleven.

Until today, that is. In an important new analysis for the Sutton Trust, Dr Rebecca Allen and her colleagues at Education Datalab have looked in detail at the data for primary school admissions and have discovered over 1500 primaries – just under one in ten – where the difference in free school meal intake is more than nine percentage points below that of the communities from which they recruit.

The pattern seems strongest in some – though not all – London boroughs and in areas outside London where there are strong faith-based, particularly Catholic, state schools. There does seem to be a higher propensity for some academies and free schools – which can vary admissions policies from the local authority – to be among the schools that come through as more socially selective.

Importantly, Dr Allen has looked not just at where this social selection is taking place but its impact on standards. So, 13% of Ofsted outstanding primary schools fit within her rigorous definition of social selectivity compared with 7% of those requiring improvement, and just 1% of those in the bottom 10% of performance in the tests at eleven are among the most socially selective, while 14% of those in the top 10% of performance are among top 10% most socially selective primaries.

So this matters to children’s life chances, especially those of poorer pupils where earlier Sutton Trust research has identified a 19 month school readiness gap. And while some education reformers dismiss admissions issues on the grounds that they’re ‘making all schools good’, the cold reality is that some primaries (just like some secondaries or universities) will always be better, and their intakes should reflect society better when the taxpayer is footing the bill.

But what do we do about it? Were we to take a coldly scientific position we might argue for a system of lotteries in primary schools, but while they have some merit as part of the admissions policies for popular urban secondaries, such an approach would be impractical in primary schools.

Instead, we need to look at how schools apply the admissions code. We make three suggestions today. The first is that schools – including faith schools – should consider prioritising pupil premium pupils ahead of others in their admissions criteria (they already do this for children in care). The second is that we need the Admissions Code to be properly enforced, particularly in parts of London where parents have been known to rent a flat close to a good school for the application process (and no longer). And finally, while we understand the wish of the Catholic and Anglican churches to maintain the ethos of their schools, we applaud those that have already decided to make a proportion of places available for those of other faiths – something required of new faith free schools.

The attention given to secondary school choices should not blind us from the impact of social selection in primaries. Today’s new report should help start a debate on how we ensure that the best state primaries are not the preserve of the better off.

Tories,bureaucracy and extremist schools

I hold no truck for Hizb ut-Tahrir. I would certainly share Tony Blair's instincts that they should be banned. But they are not. Nor is there any evidence that the organisation is running two independent schools in Slough and Haringey which receive state funding under the government's under-fives programme that has relied largely - as apparently will the Tories' new schools programme - on the private and voluntary sectors for expansion. David Cameron and Michael Gove have been condemning the Government for funding these schools.

Yet Tory spokesmen win applause from headteachers pledging that the Tories' new schools will be funded with the minimum of bureaucracy, sweeping aside most current checks. I'm all in favour of cutting bureaucracy and slashing the size of DCSF circulars - I spent many an hour trying to do so when I worked in the old education department.

But some bureaucracy does have a purpose. For example, Ofsted currently looks at what a state school does to promote community cohesion as well as teaching, behaviour, leadership and attendance, a measure introduced precisely to ensure that state funding does not go to sectarian or cultish religious schools. The curriculum includes citizenship - following a review in which Lord Baker was prominent - to promote democracy and create a common sense of identity. No longer, apparently, if the Tories have their way. And I'm not aware of any Tory plan for a more rigorous inspection of independent schools; if there is one, perhaps they could share it with the sector.

How exactly can the Tories guarantee us that they will not fund a school run, say, by a group of Muslim parents where some people suspect a hidden promoter but cannot prove it, under their free-for-all? Either they will have proper (bureaucratic) checks or they will not.

Destroying faith schools

On a visit to East Germany in 1985, I met an MP who belonged to the GDR's Christian Democratic party. I was part of a group who were also meeting Quakers who found it difficult to practice their beliefs. Now, you might have assumed that Eastern European countries were all one-party states. But in East Germany, they had preserved the illusion of democracy by allowing the German CDU and liberals to continue, so long as they voted with the communists on all matters. And by the eighties, they just about tolerated religion, so long as it was private; and religious people could not expect senior posts in the country.

I was reminded of this as I listened to the bizarre proposals being put forward by the secularist lobby group, Accord, which wants faith schools to stop admitting any of their co-religionists by right and to stop employing co-religionists on the staff . In short, it wants to do everything possible to emasculate faith schools except in their name and those who run them. In fact, faith schools are far better at helping poorer pupils to achieve their potential than other schools, even if they have marginally fewer pupils on free school meals. Irish Catholics were able to make their mark in Britain thanks to Catholic schools; other religions deserve the same chance.

But the secularist lobby - which often coincides with those opposed to Academies on the bizarre grounds that they turn sink schools into genuine comprehensives by daring to attract a proportion of middle class parents - will have none of this. Sameness is all that matters; the ethos means nothing. Nor does the fact that new faith schools now must leave 25% of places - a fair proportion - for those outside their faith. Often faith schools exceed that goal, but it is absurd to suggest that where there are limited school places for a particular faith, there should be no faith criteria. By all means, let's ensure a fair intake among applicants of faith, who belong to all social classes. But let's not abolish some of our best schools by ideological stealth.

Keeping the faith

The irrational prejudice that some Labour MPs have against faith schools never ceases to amaze me. Some of them have gleefully latched onto a story in the Times that suggests a significant proportion of parents are baptising their children after the age of one, proof apparently of middle class mischief in the fight to grab good school places. Yet it is simply absurd to characterise faith schools as socially divisive. The working class, usually Labour-voting Irish population in Britain gained its foothold in this nation's business, political and entertainment life as a result of the education provided by Catholic schools; today's hard-working Polish migrants are doing the same. The schools not only provided them with a good education - and most faith schools provide a better education, even allowing for a small social bias in their admissions, than other schools - it also gave them the social encouragement they needed to become successful citizens. As Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, pointed out last year

In Ofsted reports of all primary schools between 2003 and 2005, 60% of Catholic primary schools were judged to have an excellent or very good ethos, compared to
45% of other schools, while 49% of Catholic secondary schools were judged to have an excellent or very good ethos, compared to 32% of other schools.

They were a great vehicle for social mobility and helped many young people to escape the relative poverty of their parents. It is for that reason that I support faith schools for other communities, such as Sikhs, Jews and Muslims, and provided the right safeguards are in place to guard against extremists and ensure a balanced curriculum, I favour their expansion where there is genuine parental demand. But it is not for government to create this demand - which is why Ed Balls was right to answer as he did at the Select Committee (whose chairman is not a fan of faith schools) - but is for government to respond to that demand where it can reasonably be met. A Labour government should be proud that it created the first state schools for faiths other than Christians and Jews. It should not be unwilling to continue to do so.

Good schools beat discrimination

Melanie McDonagh is spot on in her assessment of why discrimination against the Irish in Britain ended, not least in her observation that

Here in Britain, the Irish had access to Catholic schools, which were better than the state average. It meant that they were equipped to profit from the transition that Gordon Brown keeps talking about, from an economy requiring manual labour to one that places a premium on skills. The moral of all this is that it’s not positive discrimination and equality legislation that make ethnic prejudice redundant. It’s decent schools.

That is why the Government is right to respond to the aspirations of parents for more faith schools. They are probably the best available route for ethnic minority social mobility.

Have the faith

I am delighted to see that the government is reasserting the importance of faith schools, and keeping to a commitment made in the 2005 education white paper to enable more such schools to move from the unregulated independent sector into the regulated maintained sector. Faith schools can be one of the best ways of increasing social mobility for ethnic minority communities: for all their flaws that is exactly what Catholic schools in Britain did for the Irish.