EXCLUSIVE: School lotteries strike back

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The current schools admissions system favours the rich over the poor and the unscrupulous over those who play fair, writes David Furness, head of strategic development at the Social Market Foundation

Do parents cheat the system to get children into good schools? The Office of the Schools Adjudicator says yes, and will conduct further work on the issue of misleading applications. However the solution to cheating isn't to toughen up the existing rules, but to accept that the whole system of catchment areas inherently disadvantages poorer children. Instead policymakers should revisit the idea of admissions through ballot – school lotteries strike back.

A recent report commissioned by Schools Secretary Ed Balls found that some parents flout the rules by pretending to live in the catchment area of their preferred school. While the majority are honest about where they live, some parents obtain by deception a school place for their child that should rightfully have gone to someone else. The situation is sufficiently serious that some local authorities have asked for extended powers to prosecute parents who abuse the system.

It is tempting to place the blame squarely on parents who lie to get their child into their favoured school. It is clearly wrong to rent temporarily a property within a particular catchment area or to use a relative's address on an application form. But as with the furore over MPs expenses we should not be shocked that when presented with a set of rules, individuals do all they can to extract maximum benefit for themselves. Ed Balls has commented that "It's really important that parents who are properly playing by the rules aren't disadvantaged by some parents who break the rules or provide false information. That's not fair." Of course it's not fair. But it's the reality of a rules based system and is unlikely to change whatever the legal sanction available to local authorities.

School places should no longer be based on catchment areas. The emphasis on where you live firstly provides an incentive for parents to 'game' the system (as last week's report makes clear) and secondly reinforces social divisions as children from deprived areas are denied access to the schools favoured by their wealthier counterparts. Instead, the use of lotteries to allocate school places should be extended, giving poorer pupils and equal chance of securing a place in a high performing school regardless of where their family can afford to live.

Parents should be entitled to apply for a place in any school they choose. Oversubscribed schools would then allocate places through a lottery – entirely eradicating the inbuilt advantage to the wealthy that catchment areas provide. This is unlikely to cause unnecessary disruption – most families will still choose their local school – but it gives children from disadvantaged areas a level playing field as admissions criteria are no longer based on where they live.

In a review of the use of school lotteries earlier this autumn the Schools Secretary was told that their impact is highly limited: "in the large majority of cases it is used only as a tie-breaker to allocate final places and therefore has very little impact on the allocation of school places in general". This must change. As the SMF suggested as far back as 2004, parents should be given a free choice of school, with oversubscribed schools using ballots to determine who gets a place, without regard to catchment areas that artificially inflate house prices to the detriment of poorer families. Ballots cannot be influenced by pushy parents, and are a wholly fair way of determining which children get into the most popular schools.

Could lotteries threaten the key role of schools in local communities? They provide a focus for community activity and are a natural place for both parents and pupils to form bonds with one another. Some have argued that pupils drawn from a wider range of areas as a result of lotteries could undermine the place of schools in the community. While this objection should be taken seriously and the social importance of schools acknowledged, the truth is that how places are allocated will make little difference to the majority of people. Most parents and children will always choose to go to their local school – the same is true of other healthcare where most patients are treated locally even though they can choose any hospital in the country. Lotteries are simply about a fairer system for pupils who may not have access to good schools because of where they live.

The only real objection to the extension of lotteries into school admissions is a political one. The Office of the School Adjudicator's report found that few Local Authorities will adopt a ballot based system because of its high negative media profile. Richer parents are terrified of change to a system that benefits them to the detriment of poorer, less articulate, parents. One parent writing on a Times blog argued that "Parents have the right to do everything they can to further their child's interests." This is fundamentally antisocial. Parents, just like everybody else, have a wider responsibility than just to their own child. This should include recognition that manipulating a catchment based admissions system is unfair and harmful to the rest of society.

It is time for politicians to accept that parental choice of school should be for the many, not the few. Allowing parents to choose any school they wish, regardless of where they live, is the fairest way of evening up educational access and giving all children access to the best possible education. It is time for school lotteries to strike back against an admissions system that favours the rich over the poor and the unscrupulous over those who play fair.