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Education and Inspections Bill

No, I do not accept that. The local authority is far more likely than a school to be impartial, as it does not have an incentive to favour one school over another or to improve the standard of only a few schools. We have seen a great deal of evidence of cheating by schools, so to increase confidence in the system we must try to give the administration of the system to an impartial body. That would help to iron out the problem of cheating to which Members have drawn attention, including prior knowledge of the family. A child’s brothers and sisters may be pupils at the school, or staff may have met parents at parents’ evenings. In Committee, the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) highlighted the case of a faith school in London. Various procedures allow parents up to half a dozen contacts with the school before they submit an application. It is therefore unreasonable to assume that a school would not have prior knowledge of a family in such cases. New clause 24 proposes that admissions criteria should be set by the relevant admissions authority, whether the school or the local authority, in accordance with the code. Those policies would then be submitted to a named local authority officer, who administers admissions in accordance with the criteria. Parents would apply centrally to the local authority, which would make application a great deal easier. Obviously, this is not the case in London, but in some areas parents are forced to submit applications to successive schools. Parents would state their preferred school and the authority would sort the applications, matching the children against schools’ criteria.