---

Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 71 to 73. At present, we have a state system that is almost entirely socially selective, or where it is not it is capable of being socially selective. Those with money and the ability to manipulate their own lives can choose where they live and overcome any geographical criterion, can tutor their child or send them to private schools as the ultimate form of tutoring to get into grammar schools, which is why they have captured that sector of the state market, or they can, and do in large quantities, suddenly become religious to qualify for Catholic or Church of England schools. I observe all of this in my daily life as editor of the Good Schools Guide. I applaud parents wanting to do better for their children. It is a great motivating force and a great good. It is something that we should all encourage. We have let this great force act entirely for the benefit of the people who are applying it. We ought, ought we not, to have learnt from Adam Smith that where you have a great force of this nature—in Adam Smith’s case the desire to better oneself financially—it can be harnessed to the good of society, and then everyone benefits from it. That is really what we ought to be trying to do in schools, and it seems to me that there are various ways of going about it. One obvious one, which might appeal to my Front Bench, is to allow anyone to establish a state school whenever they wanted to; to have complete freedom of establishment of state schools, so that if someone wanted a good state school in an area where there was not one they could go out and establish one. That is a fairly expensive way of doing it, but it is certainly theoretically attractive. I do not think that it will work with this Government, and I do not think it is on the cards in the near future. We can look at improving admission arrangements to see whether we can make sure that at least an element of them is not capable of social manipulation, or at least is very difficult to manipulate socially. The Government are trying this a bit through banding, but where banding has been in place for a while, say with some of the early city technology colleges, the middle classes are getting pretty good at working it. You get to know the pattern, and you say to your kid, ““Come on, we want you to do a bit worse than that””. You make sure they get in to band B or band C so that they can get the admissions from where you are living. It is all a process that is capable of manipulation. The system that I like is the one that is not often employed, but I came across it first with Haberdashers’ Hatcham, which is one of the new academies where they have gone for balloted admissions. If you set the bounds of your ballot sufficiently wide—Hatcham has it at three miles—you can encompass such a broad section of the population and such a large number of houses that it becomes pretty impossible to predict whether you will get in on a ballot from any particular location. There are certainly no other known ways of working a ballot. So you open a good school up—and Haberdashers’ Hatcham is a good school—to anyone regardless of their ability to take advantage of conventional means of admission. It seems to me that ballots have the potential to open up schools in a way that grammar schools used to; to anyone. The old grammar school system—which had many iniquities and which I did not support—at least allowed people to get on to the educational ladder from wherever they happened to be in society. We need to produce something that has that breadth, and ballots seem to me to be the way to do it. Given that, how do we get there? Amendment No. 71 is an exploration of how we get there. I do not think you can do it straight away. You cannot come in and suddenly say that 25 per cent of school admissions shall be by ballot. You disturb communities too much, and you disturb reasonable parental expectations of what the system would look like. You would find yourself immediately unpopular with a large section of society and it is not doable. However, even those who benefit most from the current system have a strong social conscience. Many of the people who play the current system hard are fervent Guardian readers with deep social consciences, who would be delighted at the idea that they were bringing other people with them in the success that they were finding for their children. There is no doubt also that the breadth of middle-class England would wish to see the whole community benefit from the sort of good schools that their children were going to. If balloting is introduced gradually, and I propose that it is brought in at 5 per cent and then in gradual 5 per cent increments—although that could be faster, but there would be no compulsion—a predictable move towards 25 per cent would be introduced and be acceptable to those who benefit from the current system, but, within a reasonable time in the context of educational timescales, would achieve a much fairer admissions system. Subsection (3) of my amendment is concerned with grammar and faith schools. After all, by their nature, they draw children from a wide geographical spread. Is it enough to say that those schools should have geographical selection, as well? I suspect that the answer is that it is not. As the Minister knows, I do not accept the arguments made by faith schools that admitting pupils from outside the faith destroys the faith element of the school and I certainly do not believe that accepting pupils who are not academically tip-top destroys the ethos of a grammar school. There are many successful bilateral schools in this country where there is a strong academic stream and an un-selected stream. They mix extremely well and, although there is an academic ethos, such schools have the virtue of producing a broad spread of pupils. That is a successful model; so I do not believe that grammar schools would suffer from being required to have balloted admissions. If it were left completely up to me, I would probably leave out subsection (3), so that every school would have to have unconditional ballots. Amendment No. 72 looks at the issue from the other side. Many parents want to know where their children are going, want to choose a good local school and do not want to be thrown into a cauldron in which they might not be accepted by any of the schools that they select. They want certainty. Balloted admission systems would produce a guaranteed place for those pupils. That, too, would be done gradually. In good schools, all admissions would be by guaranteed place to begin with, because everyone who lived locally would want their children to go to a good school. You would then say to that school, ““You have either to expand and take on some extra places that, in time, would be filled by ballot, or gradually you have to reduce the number of guaranteed places to make room for the balloted places””. Thereby, a system could evolve in which every child has a guaranteed place and every school has approaching 25 per cent of its places allocated by ballot. The whole system would balance between one year and another—not perfectly in any particular year but, if there is an imbalance, it would gradually work itself out and produce a much fairer system. The guaranteed element would thus produce a system that would be welcome to those who did not wish to take part in a fully balloted system. Clearly, that complicated system could not be enacted merely by a Back-Bench amendment at a late stage in the Bill, but perhaps we can open things up so that local education authorities can explore that route and propose systems to the Government whereby these two characteristics can be brought into play in local admission systems. Amendment No. 73 would allow the Government to run a few pilots to see how the system would work and, after 10 years, we could come back and say, ““This is the way we want to go””.