The Brighton lottery
Civitas, 2 March 2007
Who is going to win this lottery? It looks as though the answer might be the private sector – and not social integration.
The Times today tells us that ‘hundreds more parents are considering private school after the allocation of state school places by lottery in Brighton.’ £14,500-a-year Brighton College was apparently inundated with admission enquiries after Brighton council announced plans to assign places to over-subscribed secondary schools by luck of the draw rather than the traditional catchment area assignment.
So if, as David Green writes in The Telegraph today, underlying the introduction of a school lottery system is an egalitarianism-driven ‘malice towards private schools’ an ensuing middle-class flock to the private sector looks rather like an own goal for the government. If spreading the opportunity to go to a good school via a school lottery is to be the emphasis, rather than improving all schools, then instead of greater social class mixing the greater likelihood is a resultant two-tier system where the poor go to poor state schools and the richer go to private schools.
But New Labour has done nothing but try to improve schools for the last ten years, cries ring out. Indeed, but not only has the improvement drive frequently set learning back, the strategy that really would raise standards has been woefully ignored. One thing is for sure in the current school debate: the wrong sort of class is the focus. The single most common reason why parents move their children from the state to the independent sector is class size. Despite much boosted investment and even more innovation, the government has consistently ignored the significance of class size. It is of little surprise then to read in today’s Times Education Supplement [TES] under the headline, ‘Crammers take state cash,’ that ‘teenagers, typically on the C/D borderline at GCSE, are [now being] offered tuition in classes as small as six as schools and councils try to improve their performance table rankings’. The TES highlight that if borderline pupils get Cs rather than Ds, it makes an extra 3 to 5 per cent difference to the school’s score.
Of course, the other noticeable thing about the crammer story, apart from failure in the state school system, target chasing and the neglected importance of smaller classes, is that desperation in the state system has again meant calling on the services of the private sector.
Is the Brighton lottery genuinely egalitarian? It is crudely egalitarian in the same sense that the National lottery is. The question is, however, is the lottery a just and fair way to allocate a scarce resource of this moral kind? The problem is that a lottery ignores the criterion of desert. The moral case for some children to obtain a place may be weightier than others. Presumably, the reason for this situation is that this is a better school than some others in Brighton. Why? Surely parents have the right to expect a uniformly high standard of education in whatever school their child attends.
If this is merely an attempt to outflank middleclass parents – it won’t work. As increasingly parents are driven to consider private education (even if they can barely afford it). It is the inferior quality of some schools which fuels poor social integration and cohesion.
Richard Tingle 05/03/07
Class size is important, but as important or even more important in some ways is overall school size.
A face-to-face community in which teachers know the names of most of the children in the school, and children know most of the teachers cannot be much larger than 5-600, way smaller than most current comprehensives. The average primary school, in which such relationships often work very well, is smaller still – 3-400 maximum as a rule.
These sizes help the individual child to feel he has a place in the scheme of things, and encourage teachers to stay longer in a more satisfying environment.
We have treated these huge schools like learning assembly lines rather than as the moral communities which smaller (and sadly usually private) schools readily and productively become.