New Clause 4
Education and Inspections Bill
11:45 am
Sarah Teather (Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Education & Skills; Brent East, Liberal Democrat)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
In our previous sitting, we discussed the new skeletal code for admissions and admission forums. I said that the code is in many ways a welcome advance, in that it touches on many of the points of concern relating to covert selection—for example, it highlights the fact that it is totally unacceptable to use information gleaned about a family from open evenings or other meetings with the family held because brothers or sisters are at the school in question. The right hon. Member for Redditch indicated that she would look into whether the use of telephone information could be included in the code. The problem is ensuring that the code is put into practice and enforced adequately. A challenge based on many of the code’s provisions would require a subjective judgment, given that they deal with soft information gained through informal meetings.
We know from surveys that as many as one in four head teachers admit to bending the rules in order to cherry-pick pupils, and so artificially to improve their results and league table position and appear a better school. The problem is that when one head teacher or school cheats, it breaks everybody’s trust in the system—parents and students. Such practices undermine the system and the work that the Government are trying to do by introducing the code.
It seems to us that best way to remove the danger of cheating would be to allow local authorities to administer the criteria. The new clause would not prevent schools from setting their own criteria, but if it is not accepted we shall press an amendment that would do so. The new clause suggests that if the criteria are objective, as the code says they should be, they could be administered by anybody—they do not need to be administered by the school in question. The best body to administer the process is the local authority. The local authority has no incentive to cheat. It does not favour one school in its area over another or wish artificially to inflate the league table position of one school rather than another. It is disinterested and impartial; it wishes only to raise the standards of all of the schools in its area.
That would be particularly helpful in ironing out problems such as knowledge of a family gained through brothers and sisters being at a school or through open evenings or telephone conversations. It is unreasonable to expect a school not to have knowledge, sometimes quite considerable, of a family prior to the admissions process. In our previous sitting, the hon. Member for Bury, North, highlighted the case of a Church of England school in London where there was considerable contact between parents and the school some weeks before the commencement of the admissions process. It would be entirely unreasonable to expect a school not to have knowledge of a family, and it would be difficult to test whether that knowledge was used in the admissions process.