asked Her Majesty’s Government:
What is their response to the proposed action by Brighton and Hove City Council to allocate places by lottery for oversubscribed schools.
My Lords, this is a matter for the local authority after local consultation. It is a cardinal principle of admissions law that parents’ expression of a preference for a school should, where possible, be honoured. In case of oversubscription, there are a number of permissible criteria for allocating places fairly. Brighton’s policy is for siblings to have first priority. Ballots apply only thereafter, within defined catchment areas deemed to be fair by the local authority.
My Lords, can the Minister reconcile lotteries with the agreed, stated policy of the Government, which is choice agenda, of which there has been no more eloquent proponent than himself? Does he remember the arguments that he put to the House last summer to persuade us to vote for trust schools? He said that,
“parents have a far wider degree of choice. They exercise that choice at the moment”.—[Official Report, 21/6/06; col. 864.]
As choice and lotteries are incompatible, would it not be fair to recognise that Brighton is engaged in social engineering? If it has poor-performing schools, those will be improved not by moving children from better schools to them, but only by better leadership, better teaching and better discipline. Surely the education of our children—all our children, including the Minister’s—merits more than a raffle.
My Lords, I agree entirely with the noble Lord’s point about the quality of leadership and having effective teaching in schools. I am glad to say that leadership in schools has improved dramatically in recent years, as judged by Ofsted, which, of course, is important, so that we have more good schools. However, I do not understand his point about the incompatibility of random allocation and choice. The crucial point to understand is that the random allocation comes only after the parents have expressed a preference. The trouble with many schools is that there are more parents expressing a preference for them than there are places available. If I were a magician, I would be able to magic up the additional places, but I cannot—as the noble Lord could not when he was Secretary of State—provide more places in schools that are already full. There has to be some system for allocating places in cases of oversubscription. At the moment, the most common way of doing that is measuring the distance from the school gates. Brighton is proposing a random allocation with a defined catchment area. Neither approach is inherently more or less fair than the other.
My Lords, in countries such as Sweden, where the range of types of school is much narrower than it is here but the standard is consistently higher, parents rarely exercise their right to choose to send their child to a school other than the local one, yet satisfaction levels are much higher than they are in this country. Will the Minister therefore concentrate more on quality than on choice?
My Lords, I concentrate all the time on quality; it is a very important theme. However, the noble Baroness may be aware that Sweden has also adopted a school choice policy; it allows independent suppliers to come into the system. The policy was started in the early 1990s and now 7 per cent of all schools in Sweden are operated by independent operators, which have a wide variety of educational practices in their schools. Sweden is going down precisely the road that we are and is subject to exactly the same pressures that we are in terms of parental preferences.
My Lords, can the Minister tell us whether the local authority in question accepts any responsibility for the fact that there are undersubscribed and presumably underperforming schools in its area? If it does, what is it doing about it?
My Lords, I believe that the local authority accepts its responsibilities to improve the schools that are underperforming in Brighton. It has a set of measures in place to do so, including the proposal to turn one of its worst-performing schools into an academy. My department is in active discussions with it about academy status for that school precisely to deal with the issues of leadership, quality of teaching and ethos that will make the school more popular in its local community.
My Lords, for schooling to work well, we know that parents and children need to feel that they have chosen that school and that the school has chosen them. Surely a lottery, even for a very few pupils, while convenient for the local authority and evidently convenient for the Government, is absolutely wrecking that concept.
My Lords, there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. Parents express a preference for schools; that continues whether you have a lottery or any other oversubscription criteria. The issue that we are addressing is that, when more parents express a preference for a school than there are places in that school, there has to be some means of ensuring that the places in the school are allocated fairly. As I said, it is not clear that simply doing that on the basis of proximity to the school is inherently fairer than allowing a ballot to take place within a defined area around that school, which is what Brighton has allowed to happen. We think that this is properly a matter for local decision. As for parental confidence in the system and what actually happens, I should stress that, at the moment, 85 per cent of parents get their first choice of secondary school and 96 per cent of parents get one of their choices of secondary school. Moreover, the number of appeals against secondary admission is falling. We need to put this issue into perspective.
My Lords, is not banding a good answer?
My Lords, banding can be a very good answer. It is increasingly used in schools to ensure a proper cross-section of ability within a local area. Of course, when you have a banded system, you still have to decide how you are going to deal with oversubscription within the bands. A common form of dealing with it is now random allocation.
My Lords, the Minister knows that I approve of banding and indeed of ballots; I like the way in which they are being operated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s in Hatcham and in Hertfordshire. But the system where you can be living next to a school and, if you lose out, have to go four miles away to your second choice is causing immense pain to the people of Brighton. It is as if the places on the Brighton to London train were allocated by ballot at the station. It is causing immense difficulty in the town. Will he not tell Brighton that it is going about this in the wrong way?
My Lords, that is a matter for Brighton. It is not my job to substitute my judgment for that of the local authority on precisely how it should draw the boundaries of catchment areas, which is the issue at stake in the noble Lord’s remarks. It tends to be the case that, where some gain, some lose as well.