My Lords, I want to make a number of comments about school admissions, and follow up on some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made. On the statutory instrument, I do not have any particular issues, although maybe there are a couple of questions. On the issue about catch-up and the code, that will help parents, particularly those of disadvantaged pupils.
The whole business of school admissions is fraught with all sorts of problems. You cannot just wave a magic wand, even with increased data, and expect that everybody will get the school that they want. That just does not happen. What is true is that parents who can afford it will often move house to get into the catchment area of a local school so they can get their child or children into that school, whereas disadvantaged parents and pupils obviously cannot do that.
I remember from my experiences in Liverpool before the advent of academies that it was an absolute nightmare. Often, decisions were made not on what a school was achieving or not achieving; it was often the case that inner-city schools with very successful examination results were disregarded by parents, who wanted to go to the leafy suburbs. So you had the leafy suburbs and aided schools with huge waiting lists, while inner-city schools such as Paddington Comprehensive, which was built in the early 1970s, a 10-form entry school with state-of-the-art equipment, ended up with one and a half forms of entry. As an aside, I remember trying to persuade Shirley Williams, who at the time was Secretary of State for Education, to turn it into a tertiary college—but she was having none of that.
I make these comments just to show how difficult the whole situation is. Yes, it is important to have all the data, and the composite way in which the data is portrayed will help parents. But when the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talks about local authority schools he is, presumably, talking about academies as well. Academies choose their own admission requirements so, if we are going to have a standardised approach, it should be for all schools. He made the point, which I do not disagree with, that from looking at the various websites you realise that the workload of the staff means that it is something that they have not given their full attention to. Equally, when looking at the websites of academies, one might say the same as well.
The school admissions process, especially where it helps disadvantaged children or children in care, is hugely important. It is one way in which we can change life chances. We want to ensure that every child is treated in a fair and accountable manner, with local schools and local authorities working together to make sure that the needs of young people in that community are met. Sadly, we often see that that is not the case where schools almost jealously guard their independence from a local authority, and both sides do not want to collaborate in the way they should. Local authorities should have responsibility for place planning to ensure that academies co-operate in providing places. While it is slightly beyond this SI, we think that schools should be able to set aspects of their own admissions policy in compliance with the national code that allow them to specialise in, for example, music or business if they so wish. However, the local admissions process to administer the policy and allocate individual children to schools should be carried out by the local authority rather than by individual schools.
Where the code refers to the oversubscription criteria, are we talking about the waiting list? Is that what we mean? When I have had parents contact me and say, “Oh, I didn’t get a place, but the school’s put me on the waiting list”, is that what we mean by the oversubscription criteria? Would looked-after children be top of that list of criteria, irrespective of the type of school it is? If not, why not?
We talk about admission for disadvantaged children, but we do not define what we mean by disadvantaged children. Perhaps we ought to. It is a very general term. I presume that we are talking about looked-after children, or are we talking about children with special needs? Can they be in separate categories? The explanatory note just talks about disadvantaged children. Maybe I have missed something.
I welcome the fact that mid-term admissions are more codified—that absolutely makes sense, so I do not have any problem with this SI.
I did not realise that the year 7 catch-up premium had been discontinued, for the reasons stated. I presume that there was an SI to establish it. When we have the arts premium, will there be an SI for that?