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.

What tax breaks?
Getting so bored of this.
Currently private schools pay VAT and all other taxes but can't claim it back.
This is a tax on parents NOT schools. Parents will pay VAT on fees, not the schools

That’s interesting @CuteOrangeElephant as I thought the Netherlands was really crowded (according to my friend who lives there). Do they just somehow expand the school if there is demand?

what works in cities and conurbations doesn't work in more rural settings.

Home life/ levels of parental engagement and education are the most important factors in student success.

Regular school attendance is also crucial.

You really need to address these before you start bussing people round the country. Pupils with low attendance when their school is on the doorstep aren't suddenly going to turn up more if their journey time doubles. Their parents are even less likely to attend meetings etc.

I'm all for creating equality in education but mixing up what we've already got isn't going to change much fundamentally. Investing more in early years support and schools will.

Your idea is based on the premise that some schools are just better, whereas they are normally representative of their cohort/area.

Doing away with purely catchment systems and giving a choice has reduced the community aspect of a school and vastly increased kids being driven to schools, more obesity etc etc Do I think a less privileged kid, getting into a "better" school miles away is getting an advantage from having no community and having to spend hours on public transport to get there? No, it's ridiculous.

In England schools are given more money if they perform well, in Scotland they get more money if they are doing badly. Could that change maybe work better?

This is such a ridiculous idea and would disadvantage (mostly) women. At the moment I can drop DC off at school (15 mins) walk and be back at my desk to start a full day’s work at 9am. If I had to schlep them to a school 10 miles away or wherever and not get home to closer to 10am I would have to quit my job.

I agree it doesn’t seem fair that some schools seem to service only very wealthy postcodes, but that must be quite rare in the grand scheme of things, we are in London and yes the houses closest to the school are insanely expensive, but there is a council estate not too far away and the school has a fairly mixed demographic And this must be replicated all over cities in the UK, and for more rural areas why shouldn’t people take their kids to the closest school which might be miles away anyway?

At my DC school there are places only available to PP kids for just this reason.

Erm, the obvious answer to this one is affordable housing for all, as a basic human right, so that there isn't any question of wealthier people taking the housing closer to the good schools.

Also, more (and smaller) schools.

Yes, absolutely!!

When we moved here the catchment areas were in a state of chaos and kept changing (thanks LEA!).
I had one child at one primary school a school bus journey away as there was no primary school in our area of town (another Mum saw him safely on to the bus) but then they decided to change the catchment area so my 4 year old had to go to a primary even further away (no bus provided until we protested).
I think it was an experiment in social engineering but it made life very difficult indeed.

The only undersubscribed secondary school in our entire area is the one in the most expensive part of the city. The houses around there are eye-wateringly expensive. There are far fewer children living in that area than in other parts of the city, and the ones that do mainly go to private school. It's also the part of the city that's hardest to access due to the road layout, so you have a situation with a load of families who were allocated that school due to not getting into any of the closer, more popular schools, trying to get their children to an unpopular, inaccessible school surrounded by houses that they could never afford to live in!

It might work in some places to redraw the catchments, so there is a mix of housing in each one, I'll give you that. Set catchments also allow things like school buses.

Doing away with catchments altogether is ridiculous though, you're making life harder for everyone, with those who can't afford to drive disproportionately affected.

@twistyizzy but some schools can absorb this and have chosen instead to impose inflation busting rises on parents. If it makes you feel any better, I think middle class parents who buy their way into school catchments need to be dealt with even more urgently. They’re pulling the rug out from even poorer kids. I don’t agree with private schools but the parents who buy their way in by house price while condemning the likes of you are hypocrites.

I just explained that I was a rural kid that got to go to a school of my choosing, I wasn't limited by catchment areas or as the crow flies rules, which favour urban kids.

You're being ridiculous. That policy might work in a city with good public transport. In a rural area it would be hopeless.

When my dc were at secondary we lived in a county where it was more than 50 miles from one end to the other, much of it on small country roads. If my dc had been allocated a school 80 minutes drive away but every other child in the village had been allocated different schools, the LA would have had to pay for a taxi to transport them. They'd have been sitting in a car/vehicle for up to 3 hours a day. No opportunity for local friends, after school clubs etc.

As it was, my DC attended an 'Outstanding' school which had a catchment area encompassing about 15 villages with a mix of house prices, social housing and desirability. There was a comprehensive bus service which served every village.

Mumsnet is so London centric at times.

Absolutely this! living in a small village myself there is one school bus to the catchment high school, if you go anywhere else you drive. So by the OP theory, given there are 5 high schools in the borough, one of which is 15 miles away, there would need to be 5 school busses trailing through the village to pick up about 10 kids each. Also, what about friendships, high school is hard enough without this added lottery of not knowing where you will be going to

What would happen if there were more applicants than places though? Is there any oversubscription criteria, or would they just take all the children while another school had only a handful?

That's not a good idea. So you don't have a car and you get assigned a school on the other side of wherever? To make it work at all it would have to be within reasonable walking distance, which is the point of catchment areas I guess.
No what needs to happen is to bring up the standards of the schools - not exactly a new idea and is of course what everyone wants. Plus make sure schools are more evenly spread out across the area. In our part of SW London schools tend to be clustered - we applied to four nearest and my son didn't get in to any.

@Chewbecca I was meaning more the government would then have to buy the school land from the church.

Won't be for all faith schools but most of the land they sit on doesn't belong to the government, land is expensive.

This just silly, what a waste of money.

I can’t imagine my DC being turned down for a place at the school 10 minutes walk away, to instead go to one that we need to drive to. This multiplied by however many kids, would lead to increased pollution, congestion, and decreased fitness levels (amongst children and parents who are then unable to walk to school) and concentration of the children once at school, not to mention the increased time onto a child’s school day, as well as a loss of community.
Some parents choose to send their children to a school further away, and that is their choice, but we moved to be close to a school, for all the reasons stated above and it would be a shame to not benefit from any of that.
Due to a lower birth rate where I live, there are many children now who come from outside catchment, and the increased traffic is noticeable, as well as the increased danger of traffic that brings to the children. It is evident at school events that fewer parents attend than they used to, as it is further for them to travel, and this has an impact on fundraising and a sense of community.
Sorry, that was a longer reply than planned, but living somewhere where the school is a very big part of the community, your plan would damage the area immensely.

Never going to happen under a Labour government. This is the means by which Labour bigwigs buy privilege for their own kids while still claiming to be just like the rest of us. Why would they get rid of it?

I knew this was going to be about the VAT thing 🤣

The solution is surely to improve all schools? Rather than the entirely impractical suggestion if children somehow travelling to far away schools when there's one just down the road.

I live in a city with a lot of secondaries, but rubbish public transport. There is a school bus that goes from near our house to the closest secondary, but to no other schools and also no public transport that goes near. To get to the next closest school you'd have to get an unreliable bus into the city centre, then wait for a connecting bus to take you back out again.

“Look over there at OTHER people with an advantage instead of taking away my tax break!”

VAT on private school fees is an easy win for this government. It’s entirely sensible and if they can figure out a way to sort out catchment inequality they will. And right now the easiest way to improve schools is putting more money into every school, not pissing about with catchment lotteries. That’s how you stop people moving to “better” catchments.

They did when I started school. They had just started a new popular English program so it had ballooned from 8 year 1 classes the year before to 13 classes. I'm not sure exactly how they solved that, I do remember some temporary classrooms were put on the sports field.

The year before with the 8 classes there were some kids who originally wanted to go to another school within the trust but they had to go to my school instead, so there were limits.