Middle-class parents would be unable to guarantee their children places at the best state schools by buying houses nearby

[mrz]

Middle-class parents would be unable to guarantee their children places at the best state schools by buying houses nearby

Couldn't more energy be spent on improving the poorer performing schools rather than stopping parents buying places at the better performing ones.

It isn't just one factour on improving a school, it is the whole package and parents of dc are included in the package - that is the thinking behind this scheme whether it works or not is like pigs flying seen

Hmm, the article is a bit dishonest when it claims that Mossbourne's admissions is based on fair banding. It does use banding, but it also has a complex distance criteria which works in combination with the fair banding. It's also so oversubscribed that they get nearly all of the banded students from a tiny catchment and there's little variation in the different bands. So parents buying very close to the school are still virtually guaranteed entry.

Like another poster said, fair banding is commonly used in London (it was used 20 years ago when I transferred to secondary). The tests are NVR/VR, similar to 11+ but there's no culture of preparing children for it in any way, like there has been for the 11+. In practice, most children end up going to a local school, but that's partly because the population and no. of schools is so dense. Might be different if you are in a big county.

"I'm wondering how it will work with childrn with SN who want mainstream?"

Riven, SN children with statements will always get a place at the school named on their statement, regardless of the oversubscription criteria. And parents have a right to request ms, as you know, although it can be a fight to convince the LA that reasonable adjustments can be made.

Seriously - don't get this idea at all.

And what disco said. Improve the standards - don't expect a bunch of bright eleven year olds to do what the faculty can't.

"Couldn't more energy be spent on improving the poorer performing schools"

How? With a tiny, tiny number of exceptions, you can work out how well a school will do from the proportion of free school meals. Arguments about exceptional schools in deprived areas are about added value, and just because a school does very well at getting people with very difficult backgrounds through a few GCSEs says nothing about their ability to get middle-class children good A Levels (and, of course, vice versa). As to why that is, it's a political and moral third rail, but the connection between parental income and the outcomes in schools is uncontestable.

To put some other canards to bed: you can't "ban private education" because (a) it would of course involve increasing the number of state places that are funded by the number of people in private education and (b) unless you're going to simultaneously make home education illegal, you'll also have to stop co-operatives of parents running informal schools, which would almost certainly breach the ECHR.

Labour accept the link between deprivation and poor educational outcomes, because that was at the root of Sure Start. That SS was colonised by the middle-classes says interesting things about relative enthusiasm for education, but little else.

Short of removing children from home at birth and raising them on Kibbutzes, the inequality of outcome is almost inevitable, because affluent, educated parents can in general both (a) assist their children and provide additional opportunity outside school and (b) provide a positive role-model for the advantages of education. How you overcome that is the challenge to the left; how you ignore it is the challenge to the right.

But until people square up to the fact that a major cause of good and bad schools is good and bad parenting, and address how you improve the quality of parenting which does, for the purposes at hand, appear to be linked to broad measures of income, this is all a sterile debate. Children arrive at school at five already segregated by parental influence, and until you address that, worrying about admission at 11 is futile.

I know a family who have a couple of bright children, and the parents are both students with the OU. To hear them talk about education, you'd think it was irrelevant, disgusting, abusive and above all easy - they talk about their university courses as degrees in googling.

You think: kids going to a good stable school. Parents still in education, supposedly bettering themselves. Loads of books around. They should be the kind of parents who are going to pass on to their children how to succeed at the game.
But the sneering, the chippiness, the total random disrespect for the teachers they show in front of the children - nasty stuff sometimes - and the constant negativity about education: I can't help thinking those kids don't stand a chance. And what can legislation do about that?

skidoodly - I don't know if I am middle class or not!

But sometimes the truth is that simple when you think of the majority and not the minority.

Obviously there are exceptionally clever people with poorly paid jobs and vice versa, and there are intelligent people whose child has a low IQ but the majority of bright children have parents who were bright children themselves and who will give them access to the toys, books and other resources necessary to develop their child's intellect.

Its a great idea to provide the best possible education for every person, but the UK cannot afford to do that (and never could). The debate is about how best to spend the limited resources, and in my view giving access to good schools whilst sending more able children to poor schools is a waste of resources and potential (for the country).

catherinedenerve - if you want to develop your child's chances of academic success then the first thing you do is marry someone who is intelligent!

Then the next thing you do you give him/ her access to a wide range of stimuli, some of which is free but a lot of which costs money. Even the things which are supposedly free, such as the museums in London, still cost money because you have to get there.

Being middle class does not mean you are richer or cleverer than someone who is working class but the odds are that you are at least one of those.

"Its a great idea to provide the best possible education for every person, but the UK cannot afford to do that (and never could)."

Except unfortunately for that argument, it can and does. Today, every child, as of right, has access to a school staffed by degree-qualified teachers, in the vast majority of cases in secondary schools teachers with a subject-specific (or adjacent enough for the purpose at hand) degree and a post-graduate teaching qualification. Those schools are reasonably funded, inspected, assessed and failing schools are given extensive help to improve. Parents are legally bound to provide education to 16, and financial help is available, albeit limited (EMA) beyond that.

That wasn't true in the past (Cert Eds, teachers in grammar schools not needing PGCEs, and before that limited funding of education post 12, 14, 15, 16). Today, education that many working class people of a generation or two would have killed to obtain for themselves or their children is freely (in every sense of the word) available.

The question, then, is why so many people either cannot or will not take proper advantage of this?

"Then the next thing you do you give him/ her access to a wide range of stimuli, some of which is free but a lot of which costs money."

You can do an awful lot with the cost of a monthly Sky Sports subscription. And without wishing to invoke the "prawn sandwiches" debate, possession of a premiership season ticket (~£500/yr) is hardly unheard of amongst the working classes. A colleague of mine, who had both this things (and season tickets for their sons) complained that their daughter's desire to go to the nearby RSC was "a lot of money".

I know several families (parents educated to degree level at pre 1992 Unis) who home-ed with that kind of attitude, UnePrune. Never fails to shock me.

Given the connotations of "class" in England, I wish that this was discussed with reference to buying-power not "X class" or "Y class". "Class" should be kept out of it.

tokyonambu - you really think that all children get the best possible education in Britain today?

It doesn't make sense to refer to failing schools and say that the children in them are being given access to the best possible education. The tragedy for any child caught in a failing school or with a good teacher is that by the time the problem is identified and corrected for the school, the child has already lost.

obv I meant "poor teacher"!

Local schools with rigid catchments is good all round, in my book. Walking to school and socialising with your fellow pupils is what I would like for my dcs.

I agree with you ragged, it is more about buying power and less about class. When I think about it, I do not even know how to define "class" in today's world.

"Local schools with rigid catchments is good all round, in my book."

Not least for property prices. The affluent can then flock together and exclude people who can't afford the housing. Which is where we came in, I think.

PosieParker - funnily enough Michael Gove grew up in Aberdeen and that is exactly the system in operation there in the 70's and 80's (and it worked well). He won a scholarship to the one and only boys private school, but he went to the state primaries.

"tokyonambu - you really think that all children get the best possible education in Britain today? "

No. But I think the funding that is available is sufficient to provide that, and the reason for failure of schools is mostly about the intake.

The single best thing for a school is the power to exclude. My alma mater (ha!) fell into special measures recently, with what was at the time widely regarded as the most savage Ofsted report ever seen (the head was escorted from the premises the morning the inspectors left, never to be seen again). The incoming "executive head" from a neighbouring school was given pretty free rein (and, indeed, reign) by the authority to make such exclusions as were necessary, and within three years the school had recovered to "Good", without (according to people I know working there) spending any additional money. The school, a large comprehensive on a sprawling site, had had no-go areas for teachers, and the pupils responsible for that had to be removed.

Every disruptive child whose "rights" are protected massively impacts the education of twenty-nine other children.

tokyonambu - it would be an interesting social experiment if you were to fill a failing school with an entire district of children from affluent families. I suspect that with parental pressure and fund raising, the school would quickly stop failing and become desirable.

tokyonambu - I understand your point now, and I agree with you.

"tokyonambu - it would be an interesting social experiment if you were to fill a failing school with an entire district of children from affluent families. I suspect that with parental pressure and fund raising, the school would quickly stop failing and become desirable."

My former school proves the same point in reverse. Built as a beacon comp in the 1960s, it drew from relatively mixed intake in the 1970s when I was there. Unfortunately, the affluent areas were on the outer edges of the catchment; after some demographic changes and the rise in the popularity of a previously unfashionable school nearby, the school's catchment area contracted. Suddenly the affluent had gone, and within ten years less than 30% of the pupils were from households with a full-time working parent. In the simple left-wing analysis, failure follows as night follows day.

Except, except, except. It's now "good" and showing massive increases in results, and because of the stigma of having been in special measures the FSM proportion has actually increased. And it's never quite explained why the link between FSM and failure is acceptable anyway.

It concerns me that London is the only place where this banding system is used. This is a place with

a) comparatively low levels of achievement in secondary schools
b) some of the highest levels of not getting school of choice.

This then leads to

c) ever rising levels of children in private education as parents who can, vote with their feet.

If state schools were good, only idiots would go private (assuming increase in state boarding to meet demand from eg forces' families).

One key point to me is the role of parental choice. This initiative - and most others that seek to use school admissions to non-academic aims - takes away that choice (which is pretty circumscribed anyhow). Would that be the most honest policy to adopt, and then have bureaucrats allocate children to schools?

A small part of me, the parent, thinks tough shit to those schools with crappy catchments as long as my dcs don't suffer. I would sell my left leg to ghet them into the right school. Whilst I would love every child to have the same opportunity and abolish private education it's not going to happen and I am pleased that the school my dcs go to have parents that care. I don't want that care diluted by a load of kids with parents who don't give a shit.

Religious schools do well wherever they are, pretty much....affluent or poor.

I live in Bristol where state schools are shocking, many middle class catchments also include children from the worst areas....we have police in our playgrounds. We also have a large proportion of private schools.