Now Education Really IS a Lottery

By EILEEN FAIRWEATHER

THERE were more than 500 at the meeting. Many wore the trampled, fearful look of people whose destinies worse, the destinies of their children had been thrown into turmoil by arbitrary State decree.

These were the angry parents of Brighton, the sunny seaside town in Sussex which is the test bed for a new scheme which will use a computer program to allocate places randomly at the most popular schools.

The town has been divided into six catchment areas and it will no longer matter how close a child lives to the school he or she is applying to enter: if the computer fails to draw your name from its electronic ‘hat’ then you could find yourself being bussed to another school no matter how dreadful across town. Away from your home neighbourhood, away from your friends.

It is a change that instantly undermines the sense of identification a family might have with their local community. For many parents, it also undermines the very reasons they moved into a particular neighbourhood in the first place often paying a hefty premium to do so.

And, from next autumn, any other family in England and Wales could find themselves in the same position. Under a 2006 amendment to the Education Act, local authorities have a new statutory duty to ‘secure diversity’.

So-called Fair Access Protocols, as specified in a 128-page School Admissions Code published in February, must be incorporated by local authorities by this September to ensure that, from September 2008, all State schools admit an even share of poor and ‘challenging’ children, including those expelled from other schools for misbehaviour.

But the new Code goes further: one section encourages councils to determine entry to popular schools by lottery. Thus, children from poorer homes miles away will be bussed to a popular school, while those living next door to it may be bussed miles in the opposite direction, from leafy suburb to sink estate ‘academy’.

The longstanding link between schools and their neighbourhoods must be broken because, allegedly, it discriminates against those who cannot afford to buy a house in an area. Instead, a school’s admissions priority must be to ‘create greater social equity’ and ‘reflect diversity’.

There is no obligation on councils to adopt the computer lottery scheme, although it is clear the Government is more than happy for many to do so. But it is about to be implemented for the first time in unfortunate Brighton and Hove.

And so it was that last Tuesday, more than 500 scared parents packed a tense, three-and-a-half-hour hearing in Hove Town Hall to beg a Government-appointed adjudicator to amend the system planned for their children.

Canon Richard Lindley, one of eight adjudicators at the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, an unelected quango, listened politely as five parents summed up formal written objections by 51 parents on behalf of the Schools 4 Communities protest group at a hearing which had judicial status.

Dozens more, during an open session, similarly described their children’s distress at the prospect of being randomly separated, at age 11, from their friends and neighbourhood by computer lottery.

Brighton is the first British city to adopt automated ‘choice’ because, unlike many, it has a rising secondary school population.

The council under Labour control until last month created the crisis by closing the only school on its poorest housing estate. Two years ago, it stopped trying to improve the Whitehawk estate’s abysmal secondary and began moving the pupils to other schools, which in turn became stressed and overfull.

Ironically, the problem is being compounded by Londoners fleeing crime and violent schools in the capital. At Longhill school, the worst affected, both the head and deputy head have quit.

Most parents in Brighton and Hove favour just two of its nine schools Dorothy Stringer and adjoining Varndean. The rest achieve, in national league table terms, unimpressive results.

Inevitably, concerned parents sought to live in the ‘golden halo’ of leafy Preston Park, close to the two schools. Now, however, the new ‘catchment’ areas have been designed to include both suburb and council estate, so that most include a failing and a relatively successful school.

Instead of improving the failing school, a lottery will assign to it children whose families do not want them to be there.

To add to their problems, parents who paid a premium for homes in desirable catchment areas could see the value of their properties plummet. One, Sam Type, compared Land Registry prices for similar houses in different catchment areas and found a difference of Pounds 20,000.

That premium could be wiped out.

Brighton today, Britain tomorrow.

Legally, all schools are expected to take a ‘fair’ share of ‘FSMs’ (children on free school meals) and of pupils who have already been expelled from other schools for ‘challenging’ behaviour, such as sexual or physical attacks on other children or staff. This is explicit Government policy: ‘Admission authorities must not refuse to admit children who have a history of serious misbehaviour.’

This diktat will be overseen by a new layer of apparatchiks. Local Admission Forums will assume the power once entrusted to head teachers and governing bodies to influence admissions, ‘monitor compliance’ with the Code and report on ‘the social and ethnic mix of schools compared with that of the communities they serve’.

In other words, the School Admissions Code can be used to force parents, in areas where white British children are in the minority, to send their children to schools which, say, have a majority Muslim intake or have few pupils who speak English as their first language.

Funds have also been set aside to pay Choice Advisers to ‘help’ parents make ‘informed and realistic’ decisions about which school they should request for their children. The new Code also bars schools from demanding ‘homeschool contracts’, which stipulate the responsibilities of children and their families but are presumably now considered discriminatory against the loutish and disruptive.

And if your child does languish in a terrible school, you appeal and are lucky enough to be allowed on to a transfer waiting list, what then?

Quite probably, nothing at all: the Code states that expelled pupils, recent arrivals to Britain and those with ‘special educational needs’ which includes many with severe behavioural problems must take priority and ‘be admitted to a school even if the school is full’.

The real solution is to have good schools in poor areas. But as motherof-three Siobhan McAlinden told Tuesday’s meeting: ‘The local education authority has no long-term strategy to improve schools. Children who can walk to school should not be displaced by those who have to be driven in.

This plan has been cobbled together, on the hoof, to meet the demands of an overtly political agenda.’ Describing the impact on her own family, as her youngest child waited fearfully to find out where she would be sent, Ms McAlinden said: ‘The level of stress is intolerable. All her friends now are in different catchment areas. What has been created is equality of uncertainty.’

Father-of-two Frank Considine said: ‘I don’t want to put my 11- year old daughter on a bus to go to a school miles away when she could walk to the nearest one. I grew up on a council estate, my mother still lives there, and I don’t want a scheme that just moves disadvantage-from one group of children to another. Having failed to deliver, the policy now is to spread the misery.’ Schools are often focal points in our increasingly fragmented cities.

Most encourage parent participation and volunteers, who often forge lifelong bonds with other families. But how will forcing children to schools miles from home encourage the involvement of single mothers without cars or those working long days?

Tracey-Ann Ross grew up in London’s East End and went to a ‘failing school’ in Tower Hamlets. ‘I moved to Brighton 13 years ago to give my boys a better chance than I had,’ she admitted. ‘But next year my son Alfie will not be walking to his nearest good school with his best friend who lives five doors away. Nor will any of his eight friends. My son will have to travel four miles to Hove Park, which has a poor academic record. His year group is being split between six different schools.

‘I’m one of many people considering leaving Brighton. There are so many For Sale signs going up, you wouldn’t believe it.’ Like many objectors, she cited the Labour Party’s heavy-handed expulsion of rebel councillor Juliet McCaffrey from the committee that agreed the controversial scheme only minutes before it met. The scheme was passed by just one vote. Ms McCaffrey, deputy chairwoman of the schools committee, could have scuppered it. ‘That destroyed my faith in democracy,’ said Ms Ross.

Other parents defied hisses to point out that living in a ‘good’ catchment area did not denote wealth but sacrifice. Mr Di Wu, in heavily accented English, described working night and day and going without holidays in order to move his family into a tiny two- bedroom house near a decent school. ‘Some people choose two holidays a year,’ he said. ‘But I chose our children’s education. That is what brings families there, not their wealth.’

But many teachers and political activists at the hearing supported the new system. Charmaine Evans, a teacher at Whitehawk Primary School, most of whose pupils come from the council estate, said: ‘I don’t know one Whitehawk parent who disagrees with the new system.’

Whitehawk children will now be in the catchment area for the city’s best schools. But a father of twins from Coombe Road primary school, in another deprived area which has, ironically, lost out under the seemingly ill-planned new system its children are now in the catchment area for just one secondary, the poor-performing Falmer school said: ‘I don’t have any privileges to give up, because I rent and am on a low wage. But the Schools Admission Review is just shifting inequality around. Now whole neighbourhoods are suffering.’

The speakers at Tuesday’s hearing included school governors, teachers, councillors and Left-wingers such as Sean Pillot de Chenecey, who denounced ‘this ludicrous situation where estate agents are a formal part of our school-admissions procedure.

Now fairness is in, privilege is out’.

No speakers identified themselves as Tory (or even Liberal Democrat or Green). Voters threw out Brighton and Hove’s Labour council of more than 20 years at last month’s elections, and the education controversy was a main reason. Yet local Tories now seem keen cravenly to deny they are ‘out of tune’ with the party’s new opposition to selection.

The council’s new deputy leader, Vanessa Brown, insists: ‘We fully support David Willetts’ view that education reform must always rest on the key principles of fair funding and fair admissions.’

Perhaps we should not be surprised. The current acute crisis in our schools stems, after all, from earlier Tory indifference to the State sector. It was under Thatcher and Major that today’s educational goal of ‘inclusivity’ at all costs began, with the closure of most schools and special units for disturbed or ‘ challenging’ children. Perhaps, because they could afford private education for their own, the Tories did not care about the impact on better behaved children as the unteachable were decanted into their schools.

Old Etonian David Cameron blithely assures us that his children will go to State schools. But is he prepared for a computer ballot to assign them not to schools in the Notting Hill of Hugh Grant fame but to classrooms of riots, knives and happy-slapping?

And how can poverty be used as an excuse for the poorest- performing schools, given the stunning educational achievements of children of Indian and Chinese migrants? Or the excellent performances of Catholic schools, which also have large working- class and migrant intakes?

The truth is that the crucial difference between good and bad schools lies in values and the support of cohesive and well- disciplined families.

Labour, however, made it near impossible for teachers to cope with less disciplined children by imposing severe financial penalties on schools that expel them, and discouraging ‘sin bins’ to isolate the badly behaved.

Yet just one thuggish child in a class can ruin the education of all the others. The foulmouthed illiterate also often needs specialist help, their swagger commonly concealing a violent home life.

Over the past decade, several nationally recognised ‘superheads’ battled to improve the notorious school on Whitehawk estate. The local joke was that boys graduated in crime, the girls in pregnancy. Exam results were near the lowest in the country.

The school, originally called Stanley Deason, was renamed Marina High and then College of Media Arts. But rebranding was insufficient, and some of those hardworking heads broke down physically and mentally. One spoke to me, off the record, still devastated.

This head felt the pupils were terribly betrayed. Most were good children from poor but decent homes and, I was told, just 30 held the school to ransom, whipping up bad behaviour, bullying and making learning seem ‘uncool’. But it had proved impossible to get rid of, or even isolate, them because Brighton and Hove council granted almost no funds or a designated unit to teach them apart from others.

And so in 2005, for the sake of 30 uncontrollable children, an entire school was lost. The estate’s children were split between eight different schools and now an entire city is in educational turmoil.

How much support was this struggling school really given?

A former Labour councillor has told me that dispersing its pupils across the city to achieve ‘true’ comprehensive education was privately discussed by party leaders as long ago as the mid- Nineties.

The distress of parents ordered to send their children to rotten schools cannot be overstated. In September 2005, 43-year-old surveyor Steve Don became so stressed by his long battle with the authorities after his daughter Bethany was assigned to Falmer School on the rough Moulescoomb estate, that he died after throwing himself under a train. He had said: ‘My failure to get the best school place for my child made me an unfit parent.’

Several Falmer pupils were suspended recently after teachers and police found a 12-year-old running a black market in imitation guns in the playground.

Fear of failing schools does not stem from snobbery but from a natural urge to protect the young. What really terrifies parents is not even poor GCSE results so much as the prospect of their well- behaved 11-year-old son or daughter ending up in a school miles from home and childhood friends, where they may be threatened, bullied, beaten up, sexually assaulted or worse.

The new Code means that all children could soon have their school chosen by machine. The only exceptions are faith schools and the few remaining grammar schools, though how long they will survive the class resentment I heard repeatedly last week, or Cameron’s indifference, is another question.

The Brighton and Hove parents are considering a judicial challenge should the school adjudicator prove unable to help. His powers are limited and he cannot overturn the Code, just tinker with unfairly drawn catchment areas.

Other parents are planning joint home education. A police officer told me: ‘My neighbours and I can’t afford private schools but we can probably cover most subjects between us. We’re not sending our children to a bad school and that’s it.’ What an indictment of our education system.

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