Poking the school choice myth with a stick

nick cowen, 28 February 2007

The Telegraph reports today that over 200,000 pupils in the UK will miss out on their first choice of secondary school this year. Going by last year’s figures, the problem is concentrated particularly in inner-city areas. In 2006, 33% of Birmingham students failed to get their first choice place. In London, Wandsworth, Brent and Westminster faced similar figures of 36%, 28% and 32% respectively.
Meanwhile in Brighton, the Labour run local authority has made the arguably laudable attempt to clamp down on selection via house price by introducing a lottery for oversubscribed school places. The aim is to prevent further economic and social segregation that the limited number of places in good schools has managed to entrench up until now.

This might temporarily improve equality of opportunity in the local school system, although only by preventing anyone, even the rich middle classes who understand the system, from having anything resembling a choice of schools. Of course, such a policy will not work for long as those sort of families will stop shopping around for expensive homes within the catchment area and begin investing more directly in education: extra tuition or supplementary schooling for their children. The negative enforcement towards equality of opportunity of Labour’s education policy, rather than genuine positive provision, will only put up temporary barriers for the well off to break through.
This is a far cry from Labour’s avowed policy to increase school choice for parents in their 2005 white paper wonderfully hyperbolically titled ‘Higher Standards, Better Schools for All’. There, we briefly saw the government’s intention to offer those parents choices, both to drive up standards and to offer schools more suited to particular students. By the time that aspiration had been singed into law under the guise of the Education and Inspections Act, it had somehow transmogrified through the parliamentary process into banning interviews, selection by ability and a new demand for schools to act in accordance with the Code on School Admissions. The commitment to choice was reduced to delegating control of a handful of schools to nominally independent trusts that still have to follow exactly the same prescribed course and regulations as every other school.
We should also note the shallowness of the concept of ‘first choice’ that has been central to this whole controversy. It would, after all, be perfectly possible to ensure that everyone got their ‘first choice’ of school by simply shutting down all schools that are qualitatively different from an established norm! Levelling down perhaps but at least everyone would have equality of opportunity and their first choice of school! In a sector with a 93% state monopoly, parents would have to travel far and wide to track down a school that they had any strong feelings about sending their children to at all. Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute offered this gem as an explanation.
‘Let’s say you’re approached by a stranger who wants to offer you a holiday greeting, and the two greeting choices are: a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, and a kick in the shin. Almost everyone would presumably chose the kick, and if 83 percent of them got it, they’d have their first choice.’