By Martin Thomas
“If you belong to a church, that would help. Or there are private schools, if you can pay…”, said the helpful lady from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.
I was phoning about difficulties getting my daughters into school. Not into a particular school, just into any school at all.
I didn’t expect to have the problem. My daughters, Daisy and Molly, now aged 14 and 11, have lived in Australia with their mum since they were pre-school age, but are coming to England next year.
I live in Islington. The nearest secondary school is Islington Green, famous not only for the Pink Floyd song “Another Brick in the Wall” but also for the fact that Tony Blair refused to send his kids there, though it was the local school. Instead he sent them to a selective Catholic school on the other side of London. No-one suggested that there might not have been room for them at Islington Green.
So I thought Daisy and Molly might have trouble adjusting to Islington Green after calmer, less socially-stressed schools in Australia, and that we might have only a narrow choice of other nearby schools. I did not suspect that I would have trouble finding them a place at all.
But that was the answer when I phoned CEA, the private contractor which runs Islington’s education, to tell them about my daughters coming and ask about entry procedures. “There aren’t any places”. Not at any school.
Taken aback, I said: “I’m not asking about right now. This is for next May”. “There won’t be any places then, either”. “But you have a legal obligation to provide school places”. “Yes, you can appeal if you don’t get places”.
Neighbouring Camden chimed in: “I can tell you right away, if you’re looking for a place for your Year 10 girl anywhere in Camden, Islington, or Barnet, there aren’t any”.
I phoned the central government Department for Education and Skills. Excuse me, doesn’t the local authority have a legal obligation to provide places? It’s not a matter of me having a right to appeal, but of them being subject to some legal compulsion? Isn’t the Islington education authority telling me that it is flouting its legal obligations now, and plans still to flout them in a year’s time?
The person on the end of the phone at the Department for Education told me that no question of the authority failing on its legal obligations could arise until I had applied for places for the girls (which, Islington told me, I couldn’t do until they were actually in England), and been refused flat-out. When I persisted, quietly and politely, he put the phone down on me.
I phoned the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, the Advisory Centre for Education, and the Children’s Legal Centre. Conclusion: the response I’d got is not unusual in London boroughs. But I still don’t know how CEA avoids being prosecuted for planning to flout its legal obligations.
I went to some schools, Islington Green and some others nearby, to ask directly. The school admin staff I spoke to were helpful and friendly. (No question of talking to the head teachers, mind you, or of them replying to letters from me).
The gist of it was: yes, they are always running at full capacity or a bit over; yes, they knew about the sort of response I’d got from the education authority; but in fact, Daisy and Molly probably could get places, though with a few weeks’ delay.
After repeated arguments with the education authorities in Islington and in Hackney (the second-closest secondary school to me is in Hackney), I’ve got an agreement from them that I can complete application forms a month or two before the girls come to England.
As far as I can make out, the education authorities are deliberately rude and off-putting because they want to minimise their responsibilities.
If I spoke little English — as many parents newly arrived in London do — then my chances of dealing with all this would be slight. The more immigrant kids the education authorities can keep “off the books”, the easier for them.
The Government is not even seeing to it that sufficient school places, of any sort, are planned for the children who need them. The policy of running schools at permanent full capacity or over-capacity must be draining for the teachers. For the parents and the kids, it also means lack of any choice.
It is not just socialist or democratic ideals which indict this policy. So does Australia — with a conservative government, without the Blairite blather about education and “choice”, and with proportionately a much higher rate of immigration.
When Daisy came to high-school entry age (12) in Queensland, Australia, she went on tours (on ordinary school days) and open days at different high schools, talked to teachers and students, and then chose the one she liked best. It’s a school with good academic results, in a middle-class area, but lots of kids from working-class areas get on the train or bus and go there instead of their local high school. (A lot of the local well-off parents shun it, and send their kids to private schools instead, because it has no uniform, is considered notoriously “liberal”, and has a high proportion of Asian students).
Daisy’s school has only about half the student numbers it once had. In Britain, so I’m told, it would have been shut down long ago, when the rolls started falling. In Queensland, it suffers in some ways (a smaller range of subjects than bigger schools, for example), but no-one suggests shutting it. As far as I know, there is only one state high school in the whole city (Brisbane) which is over-subscribed.
At the same time, my younger daughter Molly wanted to change primary school. She and I looked round another primary school, talked to the head teacher, and signed up. No problem.
Schools routinely run with spare capacity. As student numbers increase (much faster than in Britain), the education authorities build more schools, or extend old ones, instead of building new schools only while knocking down old ones, as in Britain.
It’s a simple and not very expensive policy, but it does a lot to create some real choice, and to minimise the “postcode lottery”. If a student from a poor family has self-confidence enough, he or she can always find an academically high-achieving school within train or bus range, and go there.
That doesn’t solve the problem of the working-class families who don’t have that confidence, and are passively filtered into a local school dominated by lower expectations — but even for them, there are usually advantages (smaller class sizes than in some high-academic-results schools).
Schools in Brisbane also, by the way, have no equivalents of GCSE, AS-levels, A-levels, SATS, or Ofsted — and are all the better for it.
A simple proposal for schools in Britain: cut the blather and testing, and first create enough places that every school can run with spare capacity.
