Scrap school catchments now

[Momentumummy]

If Labour wants to eventually end parents buying privilege through private schools, it needs to go after school catchments. How can it be fair to decide schools by distance to gates when it often depends on ability to pay rent or mortgage which will usually be higher in catchment for good schools?

The only fair system is a lottery one by borough (at least for secondary when kids are old enough to travel alone). You should be allocated a place within your borough but it should be randomized and not based on distance to gates.

Lots of people raise good points about logistics for rural areas.

No one has explained why selection by house price and rent is fair.

Catchment schools should be just that, like in Scotland, where you are guaranteed a place in your catchment school. You can choose another school and you may get a place if they aren't full but you are allocated your catchment school and mostly people stick with that.

It isn't fair.
Its just the implications of a lottery system could be worse. There is no 100% fair system unless schools are 100% identical.

A lottery system would make schools fairer and more equal though

I agree with scrapping catchments and having admission by ballot. But I would add fair banding and school transport.

Hahaha just laughing at the thought of kids from village a being sent to the school at village b. So thats 1 bus from village a to Town c (hourly service) from town c to town d (15 minute service) then town c to village b (hourly service) at least with catchment schools school buses can be arranged (means leaving home at 7.30am still) but what really needs doing is bringing the school that serves village A and town C up to scratch.

Would there not instead be a way to even things up by changing the funding allocation and practical support to boost the schools that are struggling? Something that will make it pointless to target attendance at a specific school.

We had a small insight into the carnage this could cause. Our local authority abolished sibling priority outside a small distance with no phasing-in of the new rules. You only kept sibling priority for your closest school. Great in theory, except for the families who weren't close enough to their closest school to get their oldest child in and therefore had no sibling link anywhere and no public transport to get multiple children to multiple schools.

No. Catchments need enforced. We should aiming for no kid needing driven to school (I get it will never be 0, but we gotta make an effort)

Well, you're clearly unhappy about it so move instead of making ridiculous suggestions.

I'm pretty sure that if you were someone who bought a house in a good catchment and paid extra for it, you wouldn't be proposing this nonsense.

Hm, I just had a thought.. some people live in two bed houses with kids and some live in four bed houses without kids. We should make them swap?? For a fairer society. Email your MPs people, this isn't fair. Just because someone could afford a four bed, they shouldn't be living in it unless they're using every room.

This sounds nuts op... I'd be proper pissed off if my children couldn't just walk to their nearest school and instead had to bus for an hour to the other side of the city. Distance makes way more sense to me. What we need are all schools to be decent right?

Not fair if you are using the state funded housing, fair if you pay the housing yourself, as simple as that.

People arguing about funding are missing the point a bit. The poor kids on free school meals/pupil premium you have, the more money you get. Money given by the state to a school alone does not make the school more like the ones in a leafy area. I was a governor at a school where half the kids were on pp. We still couldn’t get our attendance up. A lot relies on family background. Until all schools have a roughly equal number of kids from poor, rich and middle class backgrounds, the system will not be fair.

Why would you suggest an insane idea like this instead of increasing funding to struggling schools?

I live in Australia where 40% of secondary students attend non government schools. The people who complain the loudest about postcode lotteries and grammar/selective schools are left voting parents who send their kids to expensive private schools. It’s just a big ‘look over there’ to distract from their rank hypocrisy.

This would be brilliant if it was true.

Where we live (in london) we are too far away from any of the schools in our borough that are even vaguely walkable to get places at them - so would be offered one a complicated hour+ journey away anyway!

the only way this could work Would be to divide the borough up into areas That are walkable or easy by bus/tube ( If not put on school buses like the USA) and say that all children in the area go to the area school. Expand schools to fit if necessary. If you move out of the area you move schools (except exam years). If you move into the area you get a place.

parental choice in our area of london is a total myth anyway - if you live further away than the school gates it’s a case of find 5 that you can get to and hope one of them is unpopular enough you’ll get in.

Possible exception for SEN.

(yes I know - no money to do this)

There is a massive problem with secondary school placement in our local authority, and parental capacity to buy their way into desirable catchments, often to the tune of +500k-1m above prices across the city.
I don't think messing around with actual catchments will solve it though, but rather longterm investment in whole communities and the schools within them.
My local secondary fills me with dread; low attainment, bullying, falling roll and huge staff turnover (decent Ofsted though). What is needed to put things right is as described above.
DC go to 'lottery allocation' school much further away as DC1's primary school bullies went local for Y7 and I couldn't do that to DC1. Incidentally, DC's school is in special measures, but suits us just fine. However, in an ideal world, local secondary school places for local children build communities and this should be supported.

The Brighton system isn't a pure lottery: there is a complicated system of catchment areas with a lottery in each. I suspect there is still an effect on house prices but at least the area benefited would be quite a lot wider. Also they only apply it to around 10 of the most popular schools. It might well be helpful to spread that to other towns, but it couldn't work universally.

To give you an idea why lottery is unsuitable..

This is the Catchment map for Doncaster District, which covers a multitude of villages as well as Doncaster. As you can see, the Catchments are extremely small in the city centre, and massive in the countryside. Hayfield is about 10 miles long... and is small compared to Hatfield for example.

How would mixing children from the various rural Districts work? Feasibly, the city centre ones could mix

That'll be great for the environment and tackling obesity!
Kids who could walk 15 mins to and from a local school every day get driven of bussed to a school 10 miles away.
How does that cut down on journeys for the good of the planet?

Put lottery in major cities alone will solve 85% of the problem. Instead of absolute distance can based on travelling time by public transport to define a wide catchment area to randomly draw from.

It's the obsession with good v bad schools that needs to stop.
It's the child that does well or poorly, not the school.
Thick kids with uninvested parents will always perform poorly
Bright children with invested parents will always do well.

It isn't meant to be a practical suggestion, it is just another disgruntled private school parent trying to express their anger in yet another way.

No I don't endorse this at all. Our local high school doesn't have a catchment and selects at random, what it's done is alienated our side of town and meant most of our (very large) estate is having to drive across town, up to 4 miles, no bus (they get away with not providing travel because it's 2.9 miles as the crow flies would you believe) this is not progress. It's lunacy.

Children should go to their local school. Funding needs to be improved to bring ALL schools up to standard, not keep moving the problem around.

DC at local primary. No means or intention of private. It’s piss poor value if nothing else.

If parents think like that there would be no problem to kill grammar or sought after schools.