My Lords, I am not so much concerned with these regulations, which seem to me to be a good thing, but I really want to encourage the Government to go further because the school admissions system needs some attention. If it were a set of teeth, it would not need a trip to the dentist, but it would certainly need the attentions of a hygienist. It has accumulated a lot of tartar, is not working well and needs improving.
Admissions regulations perform a set of very important functions in the education system. They are there to give everybody a chance of getting to a decent school and of knowing how to get there. Parents need to be able to tell what the chances of getting into an individual school are and what they have to do to establish their rights to do that. They also have a strong role as a driver for school improvement. Parental choice works well only if parents are actively choosing.
As things are, this does not work. If you look at an ordinary local authority publication on school admissions, you will find that most of the data is not there. So many schools are now their own admissions authorities that all the central source of information says is that information is available from the school. You cannot look at one document, in one place, and begin to have an idea of which schools you might actually get into.
You have to go round each individual school and ask it for the information—it is often not easy to find. You have to compare this year’s admissions policies with last year’s, to guess at how these are working. This is hard work for someone who is time-rich and capable and absolutely impossible for someone whose life is at all stressful or who does not have the necessary resources to do it. They are thrown back on going to the local school, because that is the only thing they can be sure of in the time they have. The whole business of school choice ceases to operate.
This is really just a matter of getting schools to do as they should and provide their local authority with the data on how their admissions structure works, so that the local authority can put it in its brochures. It is a matter of enforcement. Parents need this and it should not be hard to do. I really hope that the Department for Education will take that step.
The second set of problems comes from a lack of consistency between local authorities. Each local authority displays its information in its own way and with its own structure. There is no common format. If you live close to the border of a local authority, you are faced with learning two different ways of interpreting schools data and looking at what is going on. This also prevents anybody producing a coherent, consolidated app or website which could really inform a parent as to which schools they might have a chance of getting into and how to go about applying to them.
One company tried to gather this data once and it cost it £250,000. That was in the days when there were not a lot of individual schools that you had to “FoI” to get the data out of them. It is now completely impossible for anybody to gather this data and look at ways of making life easier for parents, which is why nobody does it. However, it would not be difficult or costly. All that has to be done is to require local authorities to make this data available in a standard format. They all have this data in an electronic form and converting data from one electronic format to another is not an expensive thing. All you have to do is produce a database that they can dump the stuff into and there it would be.
The immediate consequence of that is that there would be a scramble by commercial companies—I rather suspect that my own Good Schools Guide would
be one of them—to pick up this data, make useful tools for parents with it and allow them free access to them. The department would not have to spend anything on using the data. This would happen because it is such an obviously wonderful thing for parents to have and quite a lot of organisations want parents to look at their websites.
Without doing anything that requires investment—and it does not require much effort—the Government could make huge improvements to the effectiveness of the school admissions information system and make it work much better for parents individually, in terms of finding the best school for their child and really knowing what schools are available, and for the operation of parental choice as a mechanism for improving what is going on in schools.
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I hope that the Government will also take the chance to study how the current system works. There is a great deal of data out there. We have had several years’ experience of a very diverse system of school admissions; it should be possible to use that data to find out what is working well and what is not. To my mind, one key objective in school admissions is to give as many people as possible a chance of getting to a good school. Where is that working? What forms of school admissions actually achieve that and what forms achieve the opposite? That ought to be something that the department wants to know, and I very much hope that it is something that the department will set out to find out. I beg to move.