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

How much more support can we give these families?!?

We are constantly giving money to low income families! We pay for rent for them, we top up their household income, they get FSM, they get PP money, they get free HAF during the summer with a free lunch, they get transport, honestly, the list goes on and on.

Nothing can be done as they do not want help and they cannot access the help.

All this policy will do, is negatively impact the children who are able to learn due to parental support.

How would an LA decide on a deserving and committed family over a ‘couldn’t care less’ one?

It works with grammars (which I’m strongly in favour of) because of the entrance requirements. But I doubt we’ll see any expansion of grammars.

A policy of the sort some seem to be in favour of is blind to family attitudes.

This. It is a cultural issue and these children are growing up to fit within, and prosper within, their culture. So if you want to change those schools you have to look to that culture. And that is where Labour run into trouble telling benefits dependent communities with multigenerational unemployment, that their culture is wrong and their children should travel miles to a school to have a different culture instilled in them.

Agreed. At my school we offered training and support to families constantly - most had excuses why they couldn't do it despite them not working.

The best thing we could do is tell people the truth - that we all have responsibility for ourselves and our children.

All of my friends help children with times tables, reading, self-,regulation. Even if you aren't educated yourself, there is so much you can do to support your child - even if it's just learning to listen to the word 'no'.

You can't have the people paying for schools through high taxes at the back of the queue!

In other words you would be swapping children with motivated parents out of poorly performing schools and replacing them with children whose parents don’t want them to be there, and if motivated will try and get them moved, and who are not part of the local community. And how does that improve that school?

And shouldn’t those motivated parents be accused of being ‘sharp elbowed’ and selfish too for seeking advantage for their children? Or is it only MC parents who can be accused of that?

People assume that everyone will magically become middle class by osmosis.

The only thing I think that would be good about this policy is that most people will experience what I've seen at our school - parents who don't work, don't care, abusive to staff, laugh when kids abuse staff...

So if you’re a high tax payer your bunion gets precedence over a lower tax payer’s broken ankle.

Exactly.

My youngest DD has autism, and I went on so many of the free courses they were offering - how to support communication, how to make communication cards, supporting meltdowns with calm parenting etc, helping with accessing SALT, and ways to support this at home, yet every single course was full of MC parents who were looking for support with willing to act on the advice.

It is the same with Sure Start Centres. They are full of MC parents, there weekly to weight their children, to have support with breastfeeding etc. They are not accessing the parents they were intended for.

So a higher rate of tax payer gets worse services than someone that doesn't pay tax or pays very little tax?!!! Shall we give low earners all the nicer houses and let them jump the NHS queues too while we're at it?

Well whose fault is that? If people don't access services that they are entitled to, that's up to them.

That is exactly what Labour are proposing.

The NHS will be for the low earners, and everyone else will have to pay privately.

So the middle earners get shafted again? Not the rich or those that don't work. OK. No wonder lots of young people are finding reasons not to work - there's no point. Have a shit quality of life and work or have a shit quality of life and don't work. No brainer.

My local secondary is rubbish, but we will supplement at home. You really can't push the people who are paying for everything further to the back of the list - it's ridiculous.

There is absolutely a massive problem with the disparity between different state schools. And of course it’s down to the parents not the schools.

Parents who are more engaged and better off seek out a few particular schools, pay higher prices to be in catchment, the results of those schools rise. Meanwhile the less favoured schools go the opposite way.

Comprehensives are no longer comprehensive as a result.

How do you fix that? You definitely need to make changes at the intake level, but not sure this is the answer. Some kind of lottery for all kids within a reasonable commuting area of a school maybe? Oh and get rid of bloody faith schools obviously.

You can’t just swop teachers - it’s not the army, they are not deployed.
The solution would probably be to offer enhanced pay to work in schools in certain post codes to make the jobs more appealing, but that would be a whole can of worms to open.

There are barely any Surestart centres left. They were extremely effective when they were accessible to everyone.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-68763942?app-referrer=deep-link

Is it important that all dc face more disruption? How does a child who has parents who care instil that to any other child, and why should they?

Schools are good (in my opinion) because of the parents. If parents don't give a toss, the best teaching in the world isn't going to change that.

I just find it sad reading parts of this thread to see how working class people are viewed :( not so much on if you agree with this proposal or not but the way working class people are spoken about like they are all the same.

We have just finished attendeding a small outstanding catholic school in a very middle class area and the parents were the issue 100 percent 🤷‍♂️ 75 percent of them were middle class though !

Yeah it’s a sorry state isn’t it.

I don’t think a lot of people realise how bad it can be. I certainly didn’t when I first moved here. The first day dd started, two mums in front of me at pick up laid into each other, there were hair extensions flying everywhere and a lot of the other parents were cheering them on. I went home absolutely shocked. I’d come from a school in the Home Counties that was the complete opposite in every way!

Now, five years on, it doesn’t even register with me. I’ve become so desensitised to it, a couple of parents scraping the playground doesn’t even interest me enough to glance over for more than a second. I sometimes don’t even notice. How sad is that?

I have to say though, I can’t fault the staff and teachers. Some children thrive at that school, mine have. They have been very honest with me at times, told me that they can’t support dd with her learning as much as they want to due to having to deal with behaviour issues in class. They gave me advice on what extra tuition to go for, what books to buy. Her year 5 teacher would email me extension work he thought she should be doing but that he just didn’t have time to support her with in class, he was also very supportive with 11+ and gave up one lunch hour a week to sit with dd and go through test papers.

So at my children’s school, if you want them to support you, they will. But that requires giving the teachers respect, speaking to them like they are human beings and not people who are out to get you, working with them for the benefit of your child, working with them all to try and make the school a better place, and ultimately, teaching your children how to behave by setting an example of how to act.

Unfortunately, there is a proportion of society who can’t and won’t do that. That’s does mean that other children miss out. My dd didn’t have a year. 6 residential. The school hasn’t done one in years due to behaviour issues. they say at the start of year 6 they will assess and they never go ahead.

They just can’t trust a lot of the children to be taken away, it’s not safe for them, the staff and the other children (another parent who had older children there told me that there was an arson attempt on the last year 6 residential they did, so they stopped them altogether after that).

I’m not suggesting that the parents/kids who care have any duties towards others. More that if you spread the disruptive kids more evenly and therefore thinly across schools they will have less impact. And it’s fairer.

Currently we have some schools doing well because of a very involved demographic, and then some schools which get a very high % of the disruptive kids - as everyone who possibly can has avoided that school by moving house/faith/grammar/private. So anyone who wants to do well but ends up at that school because their parents weren’t sufficiently rich, in control of their housing situation, or clued up is stuffed. That’s not fair and not how the state system was supposed to work.

So it’s harder for any child to learn. Are you arguing for this for your dc? You’d like them to be in a school that has more disruption?

Of course not all working class people are the same.

I wouldn’t consider a lot of the people I live around as working class as many don’t work.

I am working from home today (I use that term loosely as I am on mumsnet and looking out the window, slow day 🤣), and it’s very entertaining and sad at the same time to watch what goes on around me. I live on the main road into town and There’s always someone screaming at someone else, a fight going on outside the shop, cars screeching, those awful road bikes going up and down with people doing wheelies on them, police sirens. The council planed some saplings all along the road last week. It took two days for them all to be vandalised and snapped in two. Every single one of them.

I can only talk about what I see, day in, day out.

We live in a nice area with an outstanding primary school. The school was great with thriving pupils and long standing staff. Then children from a few miles away from low income families joined. At first it was just a few it was fine, then half the school was filled with them and children from the area went elsewhere. The kids were swearing and bullying children. The staff started to leave saying the children and their parents were hard work. Groups of these mums from the estate would ambush the teacher about their kids being told off. The care taker started to hang around just in case after school. When my children left, it became apparent the ratio of poor children increased to around 70%. Their parents would fight and swear at each other on the playground. One called another a C**t for looking!

The problem is, poor kids come from poor parents who display poor parenting skills. Those kids are not likely to be nice and hard working but rough and naughty. That schools ofsted rating has dropped to good recently. The head says she's never seen such horrible and aggressive parents like it before. She's stopped all discos and events because of the state parents causing trouble. There is a reason why good schools are in nice areas, because the parents are educated and parent well. Allowing lots of poor children to join will only bring it down.

Just to be clear the school doesn't make the child bright, that comes from the parents interaction and encouragement. I know many poor estate mums are going to be angry with this statement, but if it's not true why send your child to a posher school??! To get away from the local one filled with kids from the estate?! You know it's true, if it wasn't you wouldn't send them so far away! Poor mums who believes their child will become intelligent and nice just from mixing with kids from richer backgrounds. That is not the case at all. It comes from hard work and discipline.