Open Enrolment Means All Parents Should get the Schools they Want for their Children – So Why, 30 Years Later, is it Still not Happening?
With the many ways schools in this country can 'select' types of students, it is perfectly possible to live right next door to a secondary and still not be able to get in
- by Fiona Millar
On March 1st families all over the country will be going through a particular English ritual – the national secondary school offer day.
Parents of year 6 pupils will be informed of the school to which their child has been allocated. I choose that word allocate carefully because it won’t necessarily be the school they have chosen, or even expressed a strong preference for.
The papers will duly report percentages of parents getting children into their first and second choice schools and we will almost certainly see a regional variation in these figures, paradoxically showing that where the market in different types of schools is most active (which is supposed to give parents more choice), fewer parents will have got the schools they wanted.
Typically London tops this particular league table of winners and losers.
Baker’s vision
Coincidentally this year marks the 30th anniversary of the legislation that explicitly sanctioned parent choice as a priority for government policy. The 1988 Education Act, sometimes known as the ‘Baker Act’ after Kenneth, now Lord, Baker who was secretary of state for Education at the time, introduced the idea of ‘open enrolment’.
This meant a parent could literally choose a school anywhere in the country regardless of where they lived. Simultaneously the cap on pupil numbers in each school was removed and over time accountability measures were introduced to help parents choose between different institutions.
Eventually new types of schools were also introduced – academies, free schools and so on. This was driven by an ideological certainty, that has been shared by most governments since the late 80s, that a ‘market’ in schools needs diversity and that parents choosing from a wider menu would put pressure on schools to improve or close.
Winners and losers
At the moment I am knee deep in probing how effective those policies were for a book about the 1988 Act and what followed – and there is much to say on the subject, so watch this space. But on the simple issue of what happens on March 1st there are several obvious points that illustrate the flaws in the original concept.
The first is that schools can’t or won’t expand and contract at will, and they certainly aren’t in a position to do it between March 1st and the start of the autumn term. The second is that parents don’t necessarily exercise choice rationally and choose the most successful schools.
Other factors come into play; distance, intake, the choices of friends, the look and feel of a school. A local school can be valued even if not that successful. As Lord Baker admitted to me before Christmas: “It is quite hard to close schools down.”
Finally, and crucially, if school supply isn’t elastic enough to accommodate all comers, there will be rationing of places, hence the winners and losers.
In the majority of English secondary schools this still boils down to distance from the school, thereby limiting choice to where you live and the house price you can afford, the very thing that the 1988 Act sought to avoid.
Failure to satisfy
But the English school system is also unique in that there are a number of other ways that schools can ‘select’ their pupils: by faith, academic ability, aptitude, feeder schools and arbitrary catchment areas that may not reflect the location of the school.
It is perfectly possible to live right next door to a secondary school in this country and still not be able to get in.
This is one reason why areas like London with an active market, not just in schools but in different admissions criteria, ultimately fail to satisfy all their consumers and further skew the market towards better off families.
In truth we don’t really have much more choice than we did in 1988. It might make parents, and politicians, feel better to think we have, but as we contemplate the next 30 years of education reform I would suggest a more realistic approach and a serious look at how we might overcome obstacles to exercising choice for the families who might need it most.
Fiona Millar is a columnist for The Guardian and a co-founder of the Local Schools Network; for more information, visit fionamillar.com or follow @schooltruth.
