Labour reviewing school admission criteria

In my experience well over 90% of parents don’t look further than their local catchment school.

When I started talking to them about LA admissions data and listing which schools they could get into they were totally disinterested and had made no effort to carry out any research whatsoever.

@JustAlice

The Poorer The Better!*

*not including us

It's a great idea to balance out those schools whose catchments are all one way. House prices will go WILD in my area!

How would this work if a tutor needs to make a living?

Anyone motivated enough could find out what books and resources are needed. But this would still cost money.

In fact there is actually a tutoring place locally who accept kid vouchers and it is free if you get certain benefits.

We did a few weeks but it was crap. They had high school kids tutoring the children. And the high school kids were getting the answers wrong themselves so I left it. But obviously that tutoring isn't geared towards grammar school applications and just general literacy and numeracy.

There is plenty of interventions aimed at kids who are pupil premium but I think unless the child has parents who are motivated towards educational achievement for their kids - it won't make a difference.

Locally there are loads of kids who are eligible for pupil premium- the ones whose parents are motivated towards educational achievements do really well and excel.

The parents who don't care their kids don't stand a chance especially at that income level. No intervention from the gorvenment will make a difference.

If we’re equally poor and education is bad for all dc at least it’s the same or something

There is already a criteria for the most vulnerable children - those who are looked after, under social service care or are statemented. This seems like social engineering where, yet again, children of parents who have been successful in life (per whatever arbitrary criteria Labour are using this week) will be penalised. A race to the bottom, rather than scaffolding those who need support so that they may climb too.

Some children without supportive parents need a supportive encouraging school

ideally every child would have both but we all know that doesn’t happen

This is what I don’t understand. Too many people, including politicians, are obsessed with getting less well off families into better schools and bleat on about “fairness”. Why don’t they strive to make all schools excellent? It’s not “fair” that any child, from any background, has to put up with a poor education.

I think it means that catchment is no longer a thing. And places are based on how poor a person is. The poorer the better and more likely to get a place. If a person is wealthy and lives a street away, they might not get in. Though we’ll have to wait and see.

We live quite far away from our primary school.

And had to apply for middle school. The infant school is from reception to year 2. Then junior school from Year 3 to year 6.

Though unlikely there was a small chance we may not get a place when they love from year year 2 to 3.

All the kids classes are kept the same when they move up and the junior school is it a different site.

Anyway the deadline to apply was end of Jan. I had applied within the first week of October.

Its a 3 form entry so 90 kids in total in Year 3.
Start of Feb we get an eMail from the infant school- they were reminding the parents about the application as there has only been 78 applications made.

Anyway saved the email in case we needed appeal a place in case we didn't get in and something dodgy happened.

For some even just filling out forms on time is probably being sharp-elbowed.

Astonishing that the Telegraph can put out an article that it admits has been made up entirely by the Conservatives and people are already treating it as nailed-on Labour policy.

his kids went to Eleanor Palmer with a catchment in the yards and an average house price of £2mill

He’s a hypocrite

Look forward to attending the meetings where you'll be encouraged to increase your hours.

Absolulty not. Improve the schools in the poorer areas don't drag everyone else down

Of course. It’s all downwards with Labour. Relieved we’re mostly through too.

we read a few Ofsted reports, spoke to some other people near us, had a look at cut off distances from previous years, filled in the online form and submitted it before the deadline. Isn’t that stuff just common sense and a normal part of being a parent? Those who hadn’t looked into schools were not being prevented from doing so by those who had done a bit of research.

No, not all parents do that. Many parents are happy, for whatever reason, to send their child to the nearest school, or to a school which is most convenient practically for them, regardless of how that school performs. There are too many families who aren’t particularly interested in education. The suggested policy won’t help improve outcomes for exactly this reason; many parents simply won’t bother applying to schools further away even if they have better educational outcomes.

Surely the elephant in the room is that good schools have good (at least behaviour-wise) pupils? If you swapped every pupil at my dcs’ school (ordinary comp) with every pupil at the school in the next town you’d be back at square one. And also the teachers would move with them - unless that was banned…

I particularly chose a school for the dcs where they (and the vast majority of pupils) walked to school. Everyone going here there and everywhere - ridiculous.

Maybe they need to make tutoring more affordable.

Local grammar already do this to a certain extent.

Though it doesn't make a difference cos the it's so difficult to pass the test. You need months of tutoring to pass the test.

Going to your nearest state school isn’t a privilege. It’s a basic expectation.

like I said, glad mine are grown up. And not planning to have kids of their own.

There are two possibilities here.

1. Some schools perform poorly because of the school itself and teaching there. Why are Labour not trying to bring the standards of poor schools up rather than just moving children around? A state provided service should provide equal opportunities. It should not be a postcode lottery.

2. Some schools perform better than others because of the type of pupils they attract; higher parental involvement has been shown to improve pupils’ outcomes. If that is the case, moving other pupils to those schools won’t improve the outcomes for those children.

Agreed. It might reduce the number of fraudulent applications too.

Someone upthread referred to “sharp-elbowed middle classes”. I have not applied for a state school place for some time but, from memory, we read a few Ofsted reports, spoke to some other people near us, had a look at cut off distances from previous years, filled in the online form and submitted it before the deadline. Isn’t that stuff just common sense and a normal part of being a parent? Those who hadn’t looked into schools were not being prevented from doing so by those who had done a bit of research.

On the other hand, I remember speaking with someone who lived in one of the estates behind our house. I asked whether her son went to <school that people like me really wanted> (she easily lived close enough). “Oh no” she said. “We don’t go there, it isn’t our sort of thing”. She knew the local schools and had been put off the “desirable” one.