Labour reviewing school admission criteria

[JustAlice]

"Sir Keir Starmer plans to update the Equality Act to give public authorities a new duty to consider a person’s “socio-economic background”.
The changes could mean that schools are forced to give pupils from a working-class background priority when applying for school places, according to Conservative research, instead of judging applications based on how far away from a school someone lives."

Last year BBC had articles on how Brighton and Hove Labour council implemented similar policy, and now substancial % of school places goes to children on FSM instead of childre living closer to the school, making average % of FSM in them closer to the council average.
Protests didn't lead to anything.

If Starmer is going to rollout this model for the whole country, I'm torn, because though I'm against class division and think that current model encourages it

1. I strongly disagree that the families on less than minimal wage income are the only working people in the country. Maybe call them deprived to be honest.
2. In Brighton, faith schools are still not impacted.

YABU - we should be happy about this
YANBU - not a good idea

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.

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.

I'm 50:50 on this.

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.

..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 ?

Same, but mostly because of faith schools.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

I can see a lot of children travelling by Tube or bus to faith, grammar and independent schools in London - LMS, Oratory school, Putney High, Tiffin.
Our borough even has a special route bus running through the borough only in the morning and afternoon.

I live in Oxford which has a lot of indépendant schools. There are coaches but these maybe account for 40-50% of pupils, the rest are driven. I usually cycle to work but if I need to drive, it can take over an hour to travel 6 miles because of the level of school traffic. Buses from one side of the city to the other are few and far between, usually requiring at least one change. Loads of towns outside London just don’t have the infrastructure to support this.

Agree.

A lot of Catholic faith schools were originally set up to educate the children of the poor workers; certainly in the north West of England which had a high Catholic population, predominantly of Irish origin and with a lot of children in each family

Agree with this. Sounds good and nicey nicely, but the consequences like this make it ridiculous. Spend money getting all schools up to scratch and keep kids local where possible.

The new social contract for middle and higher earners: your tax will keep increasing but you will be both excluded from using public services, and taxed again if you opt to fund private provision.

Charging VAT on private school fees and then discriminating against middle class parents accessing state schools in the next breath…

I’m increasingly radicalised against all of our political parties, as they seem happy to use me as a cash machine but increasingly exclude me from the social benefits I’m funding.

The right-wing press is full of wild speculation about what "could" be the impact of proposed changes, trying to whip up a fury of opposition against a straw-man.

The proposals will not stop childen in leafy suburbs from going to leafy-suburb schools. They will require LEAs to carefully direct their publicity budget to ensure that more disadvantaged children don't miss out on places they might already be entitled to due to their parents/carers not being as well-informed as the sharp-elbowed middle classes.

The obligation will be to ensure equality of opportunity. There is no proposal to remove any rights from comfortably privileged families. The nice schools will not fill up with loads of nasty poor people. Schools which are located in areas where poor people cannot afford to live may be required to reserve a number of places equal to or close to the LEA average for pupils receiving pupil premium. You need a lot of cognitive dissonance in your head to object to that and not acknowledge that what you are saying is "we want there to be taxpayer-funded state schools that only wealthy families are allowed to use, poor children can go to schools that are just for poor children" - if you actually believe that your children need to only attend schools with other wealthy children then you need to use private education, not state education.

"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.,"

That won't happen.

Level the playing field? Get rid of church schools then. Massive hypocrites.

But no where else in the country has the same public transport infrastructure as London.

…as a Governor at a Catholic School this is ever present to us. We have a wide demographic, and try absolutely to take in, and support, children from all backgrounds. We have a high number of pupil premium young people, Looked after children, SEN (diagnosed and Undiagnosed). Our job is to instil ambition in them, to help them see other options, support them to be the best they can be etc. We also support the parents, who have often been failed by the education system.

I can’t believe that we think children shouod be kept at poor performing schools due to “traffic” .. maybe the “best” school is the local school, but they are kept out due to restrictive admissions policies ? Why the assumption that children will be bussed in from all over?

Surely the remit of education should be providing the best experience for all young people.

So it will improve equality, in that people who have purposely bought a house in the catchment area of a reasonably good state school, will now have to send their children to (probably) a worse one in a rougher area.

It’ll be interesting to see how any councils that adopt this, will fare in future council elections.

And meanwhile, I dare say anyone in any government position, whether local or national, who be adversely affected and who can afford it, will send their kids to independent schools instead.

I live in an area which is in the catchment for the only excellent secondary in the area. I know our houses have a premium because of this. Several parents I know personally also rented for the duration required then moved after securing the school place. Sibling rights are still a thing here so they only had to rent for about a year.
I also know plenty who've spent years sitting in church to secure the vicar's nomination for faith schools. There's always a loophole if you look

I think there'll be some temporary seperations, resignations and sabbaticals of parents gaming the system to secure places if this goes through. If someone was prepared to pay over the odds for a house before, taking a temporay drop in income is probably cheaper in the long run.

Surely they could resolve this by lottery based application eg places allocated randomly within x miles of the school.

I hope as feck any policy doesnt supercede sibling priority. I've got 2 years until my youngest joins his brother!