Clause37
Education and Inspections Bill
4:00 pm
David Chaytor (Bury North, Labour)
I shall speak to amendments Nos. 444, 445, 211,231, 232 and 234. I pay tribute to the work of the Secretary of Stateand her ministerial team in respect of the care and attention to detailthat they have given to the code of practice for admissions. Admissionswere raised during the initial discussions on the White Paper. It isimportant to remember that before the publication of the White Paper,few people in England, and certainly few Members of this House, knew ofthe existence of the code of practice for school admissions. Perhaps afew head teachers, governing bodies and parents in parts of the countrywhere competition for pupils is at its fiercest knew about it, but thecode of practice was not, it is fair to say, a high-profile document.It is extremely interesting to note how it has moved to the top of theagenda in the past six months. I pay tribute to the ministerial teamfor the seriousness with which they have taken some of the criticismsof the White Paper’s implications foradmissions.
I welcomethe publication of the skeletal code—the document that theMinister circulated at the end of last week. If it is to form the basisof the new code, it will be a great improvement on the previous code.The status of the code is crucial. As hon. Members will know, theprevious code only required admission authorities to have regard to itsprovisions, whereas the Secretary of State and her colleagues have been adamant that the new code will have binding force and admissionauthorities will be expected to act in accordance withit.
That is aparticularly important step forward, given the recent ICM Headspacesurvey of head teachers, which was published last week and showed thatabout a quarter of head teachers admitted that they did not follow theprovisions of the code in establishingtheir admissions policyor conducting admissions procedures. If a quarter of head teachersadmit to that in a survey, we can reasonably assume that other headteachers do not follow the code but were not prepared to admit to it.That is an indication of the scale of the problem, which becomes abigger problem in the case of schools that are their own admissionauthorities.
I wantto make a few comments on the new skeletal code before speaking to theamendments. It is helpful that the new code refers to randomallocation. I am not sure that that was in the previous code; itcertainly seems to have a higher profile now. Random allocation, whichis used in a number of countries and accepted as quite normal, deliversthe fairest and most objective results. It is a comparatively new ideain the United Kingdom, but its inclusion in the code is welcome. Weshould discuss that further, as we should the concept of anonymisedadmissions systems, in which the Liberal Democrats have taken aninterest.