School Gate blog: Are school admissions "fair"?

The Chief Schools Adjudicator, Sir Philip Hunter, reported this week that half of schools that control their own admissions - nearly all of them faith schools - have been breaking the admissions code. At pains to emphasise that most of them were not doing so knowingly, but out of confusion, he added that he was “pretty confident” the problems had all been sorted out now.

Really? I spent just a few hours yesterday trawling through the websites of primary, voluntary-aided faith schools, with the admissions code by my side, and found breach after breach.

According to the current guidance for parents on school admissions, published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), schools must not ask for any documents that include personal details such as parents' marital status or occupation. Yet every admissions policy I saw required parents to send in a birth certificate with the supplementary application form - and the certificate contains all of that information. One school also asked for contact details in case of emergency - another way of finding out personal information about the family or their professional life. Why they need contact details at that stage is beyond me.

This is only the tip of one iceberg. There's a completely hidden one, too, submerged darkly at nursery level. Want your child to get ahead? Get into the nursery. At the most popular schools, the nursery classes act as a sort of 12-18 month intensive interview and filtering process. For the school admissions code does not apply to nurseries.

And when nursery children subsequently apply for a place in reception, the school is allowed to give them priority. The admissions code states that “reports” from the nursery cannot be taken into account when the governors are deciding which kids to admit to school, but there is very little about a child that the school will not know by then. Savvy mums will have made sure to help out with the church fête, the school fundraiser, the nursery coffee morning, ensuring that the governors are familiar with them and their children.

This, the move from nursery to reception, is the slipstream; the secret passage. At first the DCSF denied yesterday that schools could prioritise their own nursery children. This is wrong. Many schools openly state in their admissions procedures that they do so. The legally binding admissions code itself states that “Admission authorities that propose to give priority to children that attend the nursery... should ensure ...that families that live nearer the school... are not disadvantaged.”

But how would you, a parent, prove that your child had been disadvantaged? The most aggressive schools have extremely efficient ways of filtering out unwanted children at nursery level. Like, for instance, insisting on five-day-a-week, whole-day attendance, in uniform, from the age of 3. Only the most academically ambitious of parents would be prepared to force a child effectively to start school at age 3. Many less able children must drop out under the pressure. Have they been disadvantaged, or have they chosen to leave?

The schools warn parents off protesting by pointing out that there is no right of appeal if your child is refused entry to the nursery. As one faith school website states: “As nursery age children are not legally entitled to statutory education, there is no right of appeal for those who have been refused a nursery class place.” And another: “Parents who have not been offered a place have the right to appeal to the appeals panel (except in the case of the nursery, where there is no right of appeal).”

If you were a local parent whose child had been refused a nursery place, you might wrongly assume that you had no right, then, to complain about the fairness of the subsequent prioritisation of kids, already selected by the nursery, in the admissions process to the school itself. Which may in turn explain why no objections were lodged with the schools adjudicator on this point last year.

Yet one mother with a child at one of these schools, which regularly appears high in the league tables (I am not going to name any school, it is unnecessary and invidious), told me that all of the 30 nursery children seemed to her to have been admitted into the reception class that year. Since the school only admitted 30, I assume that means no one else got in. Now tell me how that doesn't disadvantage other local parents: it is selection. The mother added that all the pupils, in the midst of a crowded area of high deprivation, were from middle-class professional families and from homes up to a mile away. Like most other schools I have cited, this was in London, where the problem seems to be most acute.

These schools, the “best” primaries, are access routes sometimes to the best secondary schools if they are feeders, and sometimes to the top schools in the private system. And they are filtering their intake, starting not at 4 or 5 but below the radar at 3.

The extreme (I hope) example above, where the whole class seemed to get into the school, happened two years ago, but there is no way to find out if the process has changed. There is still no limit set on the number of children a school may admit from its own nursery. And neither the local education authorities nor the DCSF collect data on it either. So nurseries remain the hidden doorway to the most exclusive state education, available to - well, to anyone who knows the system.

Plus ça change, despite all the noise about equity this week.

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