Education and Inspections Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:15 pm on 19 October 2006.

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Photo of Lord Adonis Lord Adonis Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Schools), Department for Education and Skills, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education and Skills) (Schools) 3:15, 19 October 2006

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is inviting the House to reconstitute as a think tank in order to think about particularly adventurous ways in which we might reform the admissions system at some point in the future. I applaud him for doing so. I assure him that he has given me a good deal of food for thought over the past two days as I have tried to get my mind around precisely how his system would work. I spent a lot of time trying to work out how his system of guaranteed places, together with the ballots, might work and how we might develop the system in due course.

Frankly, some of the suggestions put forward by the noble Lord are valuable and I am encouraging my department to continue to give them the attention that they merit. However, I think he will forgive me if I say that we need to move cautiously in this area. Taking his system of guaranteed places as an example, we could not afford for there to be insufficient places for children in a locality. What would be the interaction between the guaranteed places and the ballot which he proposes? The noble Lord wishes us to remove other criteria from school admissions—I know that he is not a great fan of faith criteria—but I do not think that he is proposing to go the whole way and remove the other 75 per cent in schools that have a faith criteria. Therefore, the interaction between those two would be difficult.

In order to demonstrate to the noble Lord that I have taken this issue seriously, I have looked at what it might mean for particular local authorities and I have to say that the system would be deeply problematic. For example, one authority that I looked at was the London Borough of Lambeth. It was the first that came to mind but there are many others where there might be problems. The London Borough of Lambeth would not have nearly enough school places for its own population if all parents there were to elect to send their children to schools in the borough—that is, if it were to try to adopt the guaranteed place regime. There would be huge problems. For example, in Lambeth in the admissions round that is coming up—