Government fails to learn the lessons

Parents will today find out which primary school their children have been given places at. The general public has today found out that the allocation system favours pupils from wealthier families. And we all stand on the brink of a massive reorganisation of primary education on ideological grounds.

For years now, Local Education Authorities (LEAs) have had to reveal how many pupils are allocated places at their first choice primary school. League tables have been drawn up as if allocation was a measure of how good LEAs were at administrating the admissions process, as if shaming an LEA would result in better performance and therefore more pupils achieving first time places. This is nonsense.

In LEAs where primary schools are generally good, applications will be spread more evenly between the schools. Parents will usually wish their child to go to the nearest primary school if the schools are generally OK. It is when the quality of schools is uneven that applications cluster around the schools perceived as doing well – quite often, this will be church schools. In those circumstances, the schools do not have the places to meet demand – which shows up as a failure in LEA administration.

The LEA league tables can also be counterproductive. They encourage LEAs to shoehorn pupils into the more popular schools – which will then have to operate with larger classes, which threatens academic performance.

A report issued today by Teach First, an education pressure group, has revealed that wealthy families have twice the chance of finding a place at primary schools rated “good” or “outstanding” than poorer parents. Further, poorer parents are four times more likely to have children in weaker schools than rich parents.

These considerations are overshadowed by the much greater worry that there will not be enough places to go round soon anyway. Councils have calculated that they need 336,000 more places over the next eight years to meet the need. Ironically, LEAs are quite good at creating more school places: they have added an extra 300,000 places in primary schools to the system since 2010. This is where the Government’s announcement that all schools must become academies comes in.

While schools remain in the public sector, run by LEAs, it is a government responsibility to provide the extra places. If schools can be pushed into the private sector, that responsibility can be pushed onto the schools themselves. Government will be able to auction provision: here are some extra pupils, win the pupils and you win more government funding – go for it! This pushes schools to provide education ever more cheaply per head.

The focus on providing education more cheaply would be very different from the current focus on improving standards. Yet employers are constantly calling for recruits to have better qualifications and higher basic skills – and delivering this requires a good start in the country’s primary schools. That’s the lesson the Government has failed to learn in its rush to measure primary education by how much it costs.

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