Labour reviewing school admission criteria

It's ridiculous and illogical.

Sending children to schools other than their closest school means

• The cost of transport is higher for everyone
• Parents need longer to get children to school, limiting their employment options
• Children are at different schools from their neighbours meaning they are isolated from their friends at the weekends
• Parents end up with children at different schools, trying to do two different school runs in different directions at the same time

If Labour genuinely want to help, rather than just look like they're being proactive, they will increase the funding for nurseries, primary & secondary schools across the board, instead of dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

One of the main reasons why some schools are more successful than others (ie the pupils get better exam results and there is value added) is down to the pupils themselves and, perhaps even more so, their parents.

It will cause total traffic chaos. The reason most people get school places a certain distance from their homes is so they can walk there. If that isn’t going to matter anymore, there will more people driving round their town or city to get children into school and themselves to work. Or the council bill for school transport will be worse than it already is.

That's a terrible idea. The building and teachers are only part of the picture of how "good" a school is. A good chunk of its success comes down to the students and how invested their parents are in their futures. Also, it's almost impossible to get FSM these days so loads of kids whose two parents work but who might be reliant on foodbanks etc who might have been in catchment for a good school will just be shoved aside for the latest "lets feel good about social injustice disguised as justice" nonsense. They're just bringing everyone down to a low level in yet another way.

One problem is that the children who are on FSM will disproportionally find getting there an issue due to lack of transport/affordability.

So, for example one of our local schools (not one my dc went to) has 7% of pupils on FSM.
It's also a pain in the neck to get to on public transport, especially at school pick up time.
So they tell them to bring it up to 25% (national average).

I would suspect that the closest alternatives to them will also be below the average, so anyone using this to get a place will generally use the more convenient schools.

So you're looking at about 20-30 children coming from 2-3 miles away. The government may well need to fund their transport or they will find that those children disproportionally have more absences - which is something that's unavoidable. Having been in the position of not having a car, if you've got to walk 2 miles there and back then the threshold for being too ill is lower. You've also got the risk that if you send them in not totally well, then picking them up halfway is much harder.

But also throw it the other way. 20-30 children from out of area getting in, means 20-30 from that area not getting in. They won't get any bonus priority, so they're going to be getting into the places the other children are from. So 2-3 miles away. So that's another 15+ cars on the road (I'm assuming they'll all have transport) etc.

It doesn't make sense,

Much more sense would be to put money and effort into the schools that have larger amounts of FSM and bring standards up there.

..yea, because children should suffer because thier parents made bad choices, or had misfortune thrust upon them, or couldn’t access education or training opportunities.

We should absolutely be levelling things up, how are we ever going to equalise opportunity if we don’t ?

Typical Labour: try and level the playing field for people of all backgrounds and incomes.

I’m not sure you’re going to find any solicitors that toss in the towel at work and pitch up at McDonald’s to get a primary school place in x years time, after the birth of their first child.

I'm 50:50 on this.

Typical Labour:
do well and they will fuck you as hard as they can - this actively disincentivises parents to get good jobs/buy a nice house. I can see people taking a sabbatical from their job as a solicitor and working in min wage retail for the duration of the school application cycle in order for their child not to be de prioritised. And delaying buying a 3/4 bed home until their child is in a school.

to say nothing of the fact that people will need to travel further to school if it’s not done on distance

Glad my kids are grown up and we don’t have to play these games.

That's a really good idea & will help to keep access to good schools open to children from a wider range of backgrounds & not just the kids of parents who can afford to buy into the best catchment.