AIBU to think the English school system is bonkers and needs a complete overhaul?

[coffeeisnectar]

Just that really.

I used to live in Scotland which has a fabulous system where every child is offered a place in the closest school. You can apply to a different school but you will only be offered a place if you have a valid reason and they have places after all catchment children have been admitted.

You don't need to apply for a school, you just get a letter saying your child has a place and that's it. As a consequence 90% of kids can walk to school, the kids walk with local kids and there are no parents stressing because they have to ferry their kids 6 miles each day.

Surely this would be a much better system! What am I missing? Why isn't this in place?

I think there is an element of chicken and egg Christine: many schools in the UK are considered less "good" mainly because the school is not selective and is therefore less adept at turning away "undesirable" pupils.

Our local secondary school is the type of school that people would be moving heaven and earth to avoid, if we had a UK-style school system which allowed more choice (a large portion of its catchment is hugely deprived). But because there is little choice, the school continues to recruit pupils from local middle class and professional families, which means that classes remain socially mixed and the brightest kids aren't creamed off, which in turn has a beneficial effect on achievement. It's a decent school made better by the additional funding it receives due to local deprivation levels (which all the children profit from, mainly in the form of smaller classes).

We had the Choice of three schools. I turned down the outstanding ofsted, amazing results one because my daughter wouldn't have coped there.

I agree that the system should be changed. I understand that the Scottish system would not be feasible in urban areas. Maybe dividing areas into catchments and then locating children within broad catchment areas wherever possible, with the aim for children to always go to there nearest school possible. Parental preference to be taken into account, but places allocated based on a lottery system rather than absolute distance within the catchment.

The current system is nuts, and meand that some people have a choice of several good local schools, whereas other (like me) live in a 'black hole' and are not in the catchment for a single school and have to travel fat away to a school no one else wanted.

I quite like the choice tbh.

I live in a city and I'm now thinking about senior schools for my dc. Both my dcs are completely different, ones very academic so will be putting her name down for a few academically inclined schools and the other ones very sporty so again will put down a school that suits him.

The difference in performance at High School level between the 'best' and 'worst' areas in Scotland is astonishing.

There is something like a 50x greater chance of getting 5 highers in the 'better' areas than in areas of huge deprivation. And the gap is actually widening.

I will try to find the link. It was in The Scotsman recently.

The SNP is failing Scotland's most disadvantaged children.

It is possible to allocate schools on distance in London. Just don't make the rule as simple as everyone goes to the nearest school. For example, one could allocate children to schools so as to minimise the sum of squares of the travelling distances between home and school for all pupils. Suppose there were no schools in zone 1. All the zone 1 children would get places in the schools nearest the border with zone 2, and the zone 2 children would not go to their nearest school but to one nearer their border with zone 3. Theoretically no children might go to their very closest school, but none would have a much longer than average journey either. (Obviously this is an extreme made-up example, in reality the vast majority of schools would end up with pupils who lived closest to them.)

I think it would be, in theory, relatively trivial to change the rules so that students were allocated schools close to their homes, and no one fell into the "black hole" described by hibbledibble above.

It would of course be complex in practice because of opposition by sharp-elbowed parents and by schools who prefer to keep up their pass rates by excluding students less likely to succeed.

There is a danger of ghettoisation of course but the way round this is to ensure that schools are funded and staffed according to the needs of their catchment - ie offer extra money to these schools and ensure that they can pay a premium for the best teachers. My children attend a school abroad with an extremely deprived catchment. The school gets extra money because of its intake and uses it well. The result is that places are sought after by parents living in "nicer" catchments (there is limited choice within the system but only after all catchment children have been accommodated).

I work in school admissions in a Northern city. We got over 600 applications over the summer for primary places for children who have moved to the city. Some from other parts of the UK and some from outside the UK.
We are struggling to place them. We struggle with Reception admissions as all the schools that can take bulge classes already have. One school has increased intake from 30 to 60 and now 90. There's no playground anymore really, just portakabins.
At high school level there's a surplus of about 100 school places at Yr7 across the whole city. Which isn't the areas where people are moving too. There's only this surplus because a new school is opening a year early and has taken 200 kids. Other schools are taking an extra 50 kid per year and then end up with another 15 or so through appeals. Lunchtime is shorted so it can be staggered. The schools get pulled up in their OFSTED for being overcrowded.

The council isn't permitted to open any new community schools. This year we have new primaries as well as the high school and they're academies or free schools so can set their own admissions criteria.

We're getting kids into schools both at reception and at Yr7. Just. A lot of kids didn't get their first preference this year (and it is preferences not choices). A very few got allocated a school they hadn't chosen. But as those primary kids come through we will struggle and struggle more and more. And that is giving kids places based on sibling then distance. It's becoming desperate really

Realistically, most people do try to send their DCS to the nearest school. If they chose not to send them to the local school, then it's for a good reason, be it that the other school is better, or easier logistically (eg if grandparents are doing the school run, picking the school near them), or for wanting a faith based education. Faith schools are a tiny percentage of all state schools, most schools do allocate spaces on distance, so the only way someone is getting into a school that isn't their nearest is if there's no other DCs who live closer who want the place.

Moving after reception does cause problems if schools are already full, but would a full school in scotland really make a space for an extra child who'd moved in say year 1 taking them over 30 in the class, particularly if there was a place at a school a mile away in the same town?

It's a shortage of places and councils not being allowed to open more schools that's the problem, not letting parents chose a non-local schol if it has a spare place.