Lord Storey
Main Page: Lord Storey (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Storey (LD)
I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for initiating this debate. Perhaps I should declare an interest as a former head of a faith school.
Choosing a school for their child is an important decision for parents. Naturally they want to ensure that they choose the school that is right for their child. The admissions code for each and every school needs to be fair and equitable, and it must be in the best interests of local schooling and not a means for individual schools to be tempted to fiddle the system for their own educational or religious gain.
The admissions code was set up to ensure that no insidious practices take place. The code states what is lawful and what is not with regard to admissions, and the Office of the Schools Adjudicator—the OSA—was set up to make sure that schools abide by the code and do not try to use unacceptable practices to skew the intake for unacceptable reasons.
This whole issue is of course set against a background which has seen more and more schools taking responsibility for their own admissions arrangements, as academies can now do by law. For example, here in London the number of schools that are responsible for their own admissions arrangements has increased from 40% to 80% in just four years. So there are potentially 20,000 different sets of admissions arrangements.
Schools, as we know, have to deal with SATs and other examination results, their position in league tables and how their results play out with Ofsted inspections. This can lead to enormous pressures on schools and to wholly unacceptable situations where they might be tempted to engineer the intake, with the temptation to admit the easiest and reject the hardest to teach being unparalleled.
Against that background, the Fair Admissions Campaign, supported by a number of organisations including the British Humanist Association, has been shining a light on these unfair practices, particularly in relation to faith schools. As we have heard, the association’s report for the campaign, An Unholy Mess, shows that virtually all religiously selective schools are breaking the law. The report says that almost one in five schools was found to require practical or financial support linked to admission, and that over a quarter of schools were found to be religiously selective in ways not deemed acceptable, even by their religious authorities. It found that a number of schools have broken the Equality Act 2010 in directly discriminating on the basis of race or gender. A majority of schools were found not to sufficiently prioritise looked-after and previously looked-after children. A quarter of schools were found not to make clear how many children with statements of special educational needs were admitted. And, shockingly, almost 90% of schools were found to be unlawfully asking parents for information that they did not need.
The Fair Admissions Campaign and the British Humanist Association have taken up complaints with the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, and that is surely to be welcomed. If they right one wrong, that is to be applauded. I shall give some examples of things that they have highlighted. There was a recent case where a mother from Barnet, despite being a secular Turkish Cypriot, was allocated a Greek Orthodox school for her son after he did not get a place at any of his chosen schools. This is a woman who has lost members of her family in the civil conflict in Cyprus. This decision, while completely legal, was spectacularly offensive and should not have happened.
Another example of the wrongs fought against by the British Humanist Association is the predicament of one family, the mother of which says, “My faith is Church of England and my husband is Hindu. We decided that it would be confusing for our children to take them either to just the church or just the temple, and equally confusing to take them to both. As a result, it is unlikely that we will get into our local faith primary school, as we do not attend a place of worship. How can this be fair?”.
Then along comes our Secretary of State for Education, who has set out proposals to limit objections to admissions arrangements to only local parents and councils. She has said that this is in response to vexatious complaints against faith schools by secularist campaign groups. Of course, it is thanks to these campaigns groups that many wrongs have been righted. In many cases, individual parents are rightly nervous or feel too intimidated to complain. Parents who do not have English as their second language do not feel confident enough to work their way round the system. You would not expect government to ban consumer rights organisations from championing individual cases and then accuse them of being “vexatious”. You would not ban environmental organisations from taking individual cases against companies acting against environmental protection codes and then accuse them of being “vexatious”. Rather than clamping down on complaints to the adjudicator, we should be giving schools incentives to behave differently.
Each school’s admissions criteria should, by law, be simple and easy to understand. The local authority should be empowered to work with schools to maximise fair access. I therefore ask the Minister whether she would agree that guidance should be published for schools on complying with the admissions code, in the form of a comprehensive guidance document clarifying those areas of the code that are most frequently breached. That would be an efficient and inexpensive way of ensuring greater compliance and cutting out many of the issues that have been highlighted. Would the Minister also consider introducing a requirement that schools follow a standard template in their admissions policy, with this template allowing for a variety of code-permitted factors, including religious selection, to be taken into account in oversubscription criteria? In the case of faith schools, I would also suggest that a variety of standard supplementary information forms could be drawn up with input from the various religious authorities.
I now turn to the admission arrangements for summer-born children. We know that, on average, summer-born children perform poorly in most tests when compared to those born earlier in the school year. This is most noticeable in primary school children, but the learning gap is still statistically significant right up until school-leaving age. This is demonstrated by the fact that summer-born children are 5% less likely to get A to C grades at GCSE than their autumn-born friends. Also pertinent is the fact that summer-born children in large urban schools tend to do significantly worse than those in small rural schools. This obviously puts schoolchildren born later in the year, especially those who live in cities, at a considerable educational disadvantage when compared to their peers born earlier in the year. I welcome the fact that the Government have recognised this as a problem, not only in school admissions but also in the child’s academic career. The Minister has been reported as saying that the rules will be changed so that children born between 1 April and 31 August will be allowed to go into reception class a year later if their parents feel that they are not ready for school. Can the Minister tell us when the consultation on summer-born children will be completed?
I end by saying that each school’s admission criteria should, by law, be simple and easy to understand. The local authority should be empowered to work with schools to maximise fair access and the Secretary of State, rather than banning organisations that are helping parents, should be supporting their work.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
I said that as part of our review of the code we are looking at whether we need to do more around compliance. That is part of the ongoing work we are doing and we will be thinking about it. I have no doubt that we will discuss it further with noble Lords as the consultation develops.
Lord Storey
Does the noble Baroness know where the consultation on the issue of summer-born children has reached?
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
We are seeking views and, subject to parliamentary approval, we will amend the code. We expect to finalise a timetable for this process shortly.