Tell it as it is

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Earlier this year the DfE employed an eminent Canadian educator, Dr Paul Cappon as a Research Fellow. He looked at the manner in which the education system in England operates and wrote a very interesting report called ‘Preparing English Young People for Work and Life: An International Perspective’. You can use the following link to access it.

http://www.skope.ox.ac.uk/a-new-skope-policy-paper-by-dr-paul-cappon-on-preparing-english-young-people-for-work-is-now-available/

Although the origin of the research was probably associated with the skills agenda and the role of schools in academic and vocational education the really interesting part of the paper deals with Dr Cappon’s views of what works in education systems. He are a selection of four extracts from the Executive Summary;

English educational successes appear to occur despite, rather than because of current systems and structures. The rigid pathways that confine students from a young age and throughout their education and training is a notable example. Since fragmentation characterises delivery of education in England, stronger networks must become an intrinsic part of a more coherent and successful delivery.

With regard to primary and secondary education, we find that recent adjustments to national curriculum have generally been sound, and that good GSCEs for all students in any educational/training track must be the goal. We find that careers advice, an acknowledged weakness of English education, requires considerable amendment and accountability.

Chief impediments to evidence-informed policy deliberation have been: few moderating influences on [sic] the political nature of educational policy; insufficient development of partnerships between civil society and policy makers; little structured external advice to government; insufficient deployment of academic researchers in support of research and analysis; and a propensity to set goals for individual schools but not for the system as a whole.

In a successful education system, the desirable attributes of the central authority would be the converse of those that we would hope to find at local level.

It is locally that we would expect and wish to find innovation, experimentation, risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, empiricist methods of trial and error. The principle of subsidiarity applies. Each district or region would be attempting to find creative means of attaining measurable common goals or targets – but do so in keeping with their own specific and particular contexts and challenges. When these attributes are present, experimentation and trial of diverse approaches in pursuit of similar goals may lead to fruitful collaboration and to regional sharing of promising practices and approaches. System-wide improvement occurs.

Conversely, the central authority would impart stability, consistency and a long term perspective. When it engages in changes of policy direction, it would do so carefully and in consultation with a broad array of partners from both the education sector and from other segments of civil society. Its intention would be to work as closely as possible from a convergence of viewpoints of its partners, so that its initiatives would have optimal chances of success. To that purpose, it would construct a sustainable framework of partners that would assist it in considering priorities, goals and means. (In doing so, however, it would refrain from delegating or abandoning its authority to independent bodies or commissions).

In such a system, decisions regarding practice and complementary funding allocations would frequently be made regionally or locally, but in accord with nationally prescribed goals.

What if, in England, just the opposite of this pattern obtained? What if is central government that is empiricist, entrepreneurial, with sudden mutability and frequent changes of direction, trying one approach and then another – often with only short periods allowed for practitioners to adjust and adapt?

In schools, districts and regions, on the other hand emulation, conservatism, rigidity, compliance, harmonisation and risk aversion appear to be the pattern.

In such a dynamic, would it not become difficult to foresee the kinds of creativity and innovation that, when scaled up, may lift a system to enhanced outcomes and to continuous improvement?

The last of these extracts is the one that for me clearly sums up what has been so wrong with the school system in England ever since central government lost faith in local government and started taking power to the centre. The legacy of this decision, taken originally in the 1970s, but never fully worked through, remains with us today with haphazard academisation and un-elected commissioners. Although there is innovation at the level of some schools and inspiring leadership teams, even there the hand of Ofsted looms large.

The message for me from Dr Cappon’s study is that it is time for everyone concerned with education in England to agree a new framework. There is still a willingness to create a workable system for the country as a whole, but time is running out, especially if the political landscape becomes one of polarised views and a breakdown of understanding.

There is not the space for a full essay on policy-making here but, one might look at the functions of policy formation as;

Problem solving;

Planning;

Priority Fixing and

Consultation

Perhaps one might add dissemination and implementation as further functions since the agreed system-wide agreement on the latter is a notably lacking feature of the present system. How do we create system-wide improvement in a coherent and constructive manner?

Tergiversate

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The Lord Adonis is one of the few politicians in recent British history to have tergiversated twice in his career. He started life as an SDP councillor on Oxford City Council and then joined the newly formed Liberal Democrats, I believe even going so far as to win the Party’s nomination as prospective parliamentary candidate for Westbury in the mid-1990s. However, before the 1997 election, he had left the Party and eventually became a Labour supporter and took the Labour Whip when appointed a peer. Now he has it has been reported resigned from that Party to take up an appointment under the Conservative government.

I first met Lord Adonis in the 1980s when I was chairman of the Costwold Line Promotion Group that was campaigning initially to save and then to improve the line between Oxford and Worcester – he was already interested in railways at that time. Incidentally, that was ten years after I met Jeremy Corbyn in Hornsey during the two 1974 general elections where I was the agent for the Liberal candidate and he was part of Labour’s election team in Hornsey.

After Oxford, Lord Adonis went on to be the Education correspondent at the Financial Times for several years and I recall feeding him stories about data on education issues such as pupil teacher ratios and the cuts to music services under the Thatcher government.

Lord Adonis is a very able man with concerns about issues such as transport and education that he is able to articulate effectively. He has a concern for those the system doesn’t protect; hence his early support for academies after he spent a period while in Oxford as a governor of a secondary school in Blackbird Leys, the estate in south Oxford located in a part of the city where there is significant deprivation.

As someone who has remained a Liberal for more than 50 years, despite two periods of political neutrality during my career, once as a civil servant and the other as vice-chairman of a national charity, I would never have surrendered my basic beliefs and, despite differences with my Party at times, would never have wanted to leave it.

No doubt some journalist or other will ask Lord Adonis how he has been able to reconcile a political life with adherence to three different political ideologies, assuming he now accepts the basic direction of travel of the Conservative government in taking on his new job. If he doesn’t, then he should make clear the grounds on which he has accepted the post.

I cannot also help but wonder if there are some Conservative Party members that will feel just a tiny bit put out at the appointment of Lord Adonis. The message to them being, even if you work hard for the Party, we will take the best person even if traditionally they have been part of the opposition to our values.

One wonders if this act of tergiversation will be the first of many in a re-alignment of political opinion in England or just a rare footnote in British political history and the career of one individual?

Incentives and ageism

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This week the DfE announced the new bursary rates for trainees starting teacher preparation courses in the autumn of 2016. The headline grabbing rate is the £30,000 tax free bursary or scholarship available to a small number of Physics graduates with either a first class degree or a doctorate in the subject.

A bursary at this level amounts to a starting salary before tax and other deductions of around £40,000 after training, unless the teacher is expected to take a pay cut after training: a bizarre suggestion. Whether schools will be willing to pay such a salary in 2017 to these trainees is an interesting question. Fortunately, there probably won’t be very many of them and the extra £5,000 each it will cost the government compared with the rates this year. In the unlikely event that even 100 of the 800 or so Physics trainees would qualify, that number only means an extra half a million pounds of government expenditure. Such an amount can easily be found from the under-spend on the total amount due to under-recruitment against the Teacher Supply Model number of trainees required and the cash set aside if it was met.

The headline figure looks very much like a marketing ploy. The adverts can now say in large letters ‘£30,000 to train as a teacher tax free’ followed by an ‘*’ and in small letters ‘terms and conditions apply – read the small print’. This seems a legitimate marketing strategy, whatever you think of its dubious moral value by offering something not obtainable to the majority of those attracted by the advertising. No doubt the Advertising Standards Authority has a code of practice for this sort of activity.

One group that should be especially wary of such adverts to become a teacher are the career switchers. An analysis of the percentage of applicants offered places shows that older applicants are far less likely to be offered a place on a teacher preparation course than younger +-graduates.

Age Group Placed
21 under 58%
22 59%
23 57%
24 55%
25-29 50%
30-39 42%
40+ 39%
all ages 51%

On average half of all applicants were placed by mid-September, but this reduces from 59% of those aged 22 on application to just 39% of those in their forties or older. The older applicants are more likely to be holding conditional offers in September than younger applicants, perhaps because of issues with the skills tests?

I haven’t been able to look at the data by the different routes into teaching as it isn’t published by UCAS. As there are no details of ethnicity published by UCAS in the monthly statistics, it isn’t possible to see whether there are still differential rates of places being offered to different ethnic groups as has been the case at some points in the past.

In the new slimmed down civil service, I do still hope that someone somewhere is paying attention to these figures and asking questions that probe what may lie behind the numbers: are older graduates just not up to being teachers or is their knowledge, despite boosted by time in the real world, not up to modern degree standards. Surely that cannot be the case since degrees are supposed to be easier than they were a generation ago. Certainly there are more First Class degrees awarded that in the past. A fact that will cost the government more in bursary payments.

Is the lack of a London allowance affecting teacher training numbers in London?

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What is happening in London? The data released by UCAS yesterday on applications and applicants for graduate teacher training courses as at the middle of September – after most courses will have started – shows that the data for applicants with a domicile in London seem way out of line when compared with the data for applicants domiciled in other parts of England.

According to the UCAS data, only 39% of applicants domiciled in London have been placed on a course. This compares with a national average of 51%. By contrast, 16% of applicants with a London domicile were shown in the data as holding a conditional offer, compared with a national percentage of 11%. In the North East, the conditional offers were 8% of those applicants domiciled there; half the percentage in London.

Now it is perfectly possible that providers that recruited applicants domiciled in London were less good at informing UCAS that applicants had been converted from a conditional offer to a confirmed place. Indeed, I hope that is the case. The alternative and more worrying scenario is that the conditionally placed total represents candidates that weren’t going to take up the place offered to them earlier in the year and failed to meet all the conditions such as the pre-entry skills tests without informing the provider that they weren’t going to take up their place.  Were that to be the case, then there might only be around 3,500 trainees in London, outwith Teach First, on courses that started this autumn.

As that’s both primary and secondary trainees, the figure must be of concern. As schools in London have advertised a similar 3,500 vacancies for secondary school classroom teachers so far in the 2015 recruitment round  according to TeachVac (www.teachvac.co.uk), the number of secondary trainees would need to be more than half the trainee total to ensure sufficient entrants to the London labour market in 2016, if vacancies are at a similar level next year. With pupil numbers on the increase, it seems unlikely that vacancies will fall very much unless London schools’ budgets are restricted next year.

As we don’t know the spread of offers between subjects among London providers, it is impossible to tell whether certain subjects might be even more adversely affected by these figures. They certainly need further investigation. Now it may well be that the large-scale operation of Teach First across London is having an effect on the market for training places in the capital. As we know, from TV programmes, such as ‘Tough Young Teachers’, Teach First has its own approach to preparing teachers. However, unless it has the same retention rate as other programmes that presumably aim to train career teachers, any programme seen as a short-service approach to teaching as a career could affect training numbers when pupil numbers are on the increase.

Let’s assume a normal training programme places 75% of its teachers in post: say 75 out of 100. By the end of year 1, 20% leave, taking the number down to 60. If a further 15% leave at the end of year 2, that means 51 are still teaching. However, if the figures were 80% for the entry rate and 10% leaving at the end of each year, there would be 57 still remaining at the start of year 3. How does that compare with Teach First over a similar period from entry to summer school to start of year 3 of teaching?

Fortunately, as a result of a PQ in the House of Lords, we know that the 2014 cohort for Teach First was 1,387 at the start of the Summer Institute. By the end of year 1, some 1,272 gained QTS. However, the government dodged the part of the question from Lord Storey that asked how many entered teaching the following September. As not all of the 1,272 are in London, we cannot really complete the comparison except to say that if all Teach First were in London they would have needed to lose just under 600 trainees between year 1 and entering year 3 of teaching to match the hypothetical figures for other training provision.

The point of this discussion is that any route that retains fewer teachers over the first three to five years of teaching than the norm just adds to the recruitment problems. This is something that should be monitored to allow for the most cost-effective training provision that best meets the recruitment needs of schools in London, especially if there are fewer trainees entering in the first instance than there are places on offer.

Teacher Supply news from the seaside

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The news from Brighton that the policy area of teachers and teacher supply is one of the key issues for Labour’s new Shadow Secretary of State for Education is clearly to be welcomed by this blog. Hopefully, Ms Powell and her advisers will be more adept at keeping the subject in the headlines than her predecessor, one of whose best briefing on teacher shortages appeared on the Monday of a Christmas week when all the press had just gone on holiday. As a result, it was entirely wasted.

Clearly, Ms Powell has also been listening to the teacher associations about retention problems. However, she will need to come up with some data on the matter if she is going to convince the government to take the issue seriously, especially as some schools would probably be shedding teachers next year if costs continue to increase faster than income.

I am not sure what labour’s position is about academies and why they singled out free schools for specific mention? Do they include UTCs and studio schools in the group of schools to be curtailed or are they happy with them?

More importantly, who do they really want to manage the oversight of all state-funded schools? Will they retain the un-elected Regional Commissioners, having now as a Party accepted a role for the Police & Crime Commissioners?

The key issue in education is that of governance and whether schools and education policy is decided locally, regionally or nationally. Place planning and the effective use of resources is at the heart of the matter. If individual schools can dictate how many pupils they can take, then local authorities in rural areas face an open expenditure line on home to school transport that they cannot control. The same is true where schools can exclude pupils without having to take a corresponding number of such pupils from other schools. Allowing all nationally funded schools to set their admission criteria also doesn’t help local planning and the efficient use of taxpayer funds. However, that doesn’t matter if parental choice is more important than providing a good school for every pupil. Do the Labour Party want to channel funds to achieve the best outcomes for the largest number of pupils or do they just want to satisfy just the parents concerned that their offspring can attend an excellent school?

I haven’t heard anything about the curriculum and examinations from Labour, so presumably this is a policy work in progress area. I had hoped to hear that Ms Powell would call for fees to be paid for trainee teachers, but perhaps the new shadow Chancellor isn’t up to allowing spending promises from other colleagues around the shadow cabinet table.

I hope that Labour will support the continuation of universal infant free school meals and the Pupil Premium both of which can help with the vital early years of education where closing the gap can make a real difference as I am sure that Ms Powell knows from her former role in the Party during the last government.

University numbers still increasing

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The first look at 2015-16 recruitment to undergraduate higher education courses four weeks after the start of clearing has been published by UCAS. https://www.ucas.com/sites/default/files/ucas-entry-year-acceptances-day28-2015.pdf According to the data in the report, acceptances to the 2015-16 entry year at this point are 511,730. Across the UK This is an increase of 12,610 (3 per cent) compared to the 2014-15 entry year (at the equivalent point in the 2014 cycle).  Acceptances to the 2015-16 entry year were 7 per cent more than to 2013-14 and 16 per cent more than to 2012-13. The total increase of 12,610 to the 2015-16 entry year (compared to the 2014-15 entry year) was split between an increase of 10,800 in acceptances to enter HE immediately and an increase of 1,810 in deferred entry (from the previous cycle).

Even more interesting was the breakdown of qualifications of those accepted. For acceptances recorded as holding entry qualifications in the ABB+ set: 90,160 were holding GCE A levels, -150 (no change to the nearest per cent); 46,330 were holding BTECs, +3,430 (+8 per cent);13,960 were holding SQA Highers or Advanced Highers, +270 (+2 per cent) and 3,930 holding an International Baccalaureate, +310 (+8 per cent)

For acceptances not recorded as holding entry qualifications in the ABB+ set: 156,420 were holding GCE A levels, -440 (no change to the nearest per cent; 53,610 were holding BTECs, +1,040 (+2 per cent); 10,580 were holding SQA Highers or Advanced Highers, -200 (-2 per cent) and 1,710 were holding an International Baccalaureate, +60 (+3 per cent).

So, in both the upper and lower qualification band sets ABB+/not ABB+ the number with GCE A levels effectively remained static and the increase in student numbers came from other qualifications including both the BTEC vocational qualification set and the IB. In percentage increase the BTEC set showed the largest percentage increase. This is despite the presumed attractiveness of the growing apprenticeship opportunities for this group.

The growth of 16% between 2012-13 and 2015-16 entry periods, despite the increase in the fees to around £9,000, shows the continued resilience in the attractiveness of a university degree to potential students. Once more detailed tables are published it will be possible to see how the increase has bene distributed across the different universities. Have the Russell Group taken more students overall, leaving other newer universities to fill places with these extra applicants or has the increase been seen across all institutions. It will also be interesting to see how the numbers of students attracted to different subjects has changed over the past few years as acceptances have increased. Presumably, a large percentage of the increase in home student is among those from families with no previous family member having attended a higher education institution. This would mean a continued widening of the social base of those going attending higher education, despite the increase in fees.

What, I wonder would Labour do about the repayments from these and other students paying back fees if they were to offer to re-introduce free university education to all, including the wealthy? After all, a university education is still much cheaper than many sixth form courses in the private sector.

Belt tightening in evidence

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Life is beginning to return to normal after the summer break. The final figures on teacher training offers will appear later this week. However, last week the government published the last data of education spending under the coalition with the figures from the Section 251 budgets for planned expenditure by schools and local authorities’ services for this financial year.

With the split between academies and maintained schools comparing between authorities on schoolings remains a bit of a challenge. In other children’s services it is still relatively clear what is spent by local authorities on say, youth justice or fostering. However, now that the majority of academies are what is known as ‘recoupment academies’ this means some comparison between per capita spending across the country is once again possible.

Overall spend per capita on the individual school budget at local authority levels has seen an increase in expected expenditure from £4,361 to £4,408 per capita, up by £47 or a little over one per cent. This may well help to explain why schools feel that their budgets have effectively been cut, since increased government take back through pension contributions and increased National Insurance contributions have been greater than the increase in income. To some extent this has also reduced the recruitment crisis in some places by diverting funds away from employing staff.

The local authority per capita expected spend doesn’t distinguish between spending in the primary and secondary sectors in the government’s aggregate figures, so it is impossible to tell whether the authorities where spending per capita is expected to be lower in 2015-16 than in 2014-15 is across the board or in only one of the sectors. What is interesting, however, is that five of the bottom ten ranked authorities, or five of nine if Middlesbrough is excluded on the basis that the figures don’t look credible, have selective secondary schools across the authority. Additionally, three of these authorities appear to have a lower per capita spend in 2015—16 than in the previous year. Now, as academies have a different financial year to maintained schools, that may account for some of the difference, but it isn’t clear whether or not that is the case form the data as presented.

Another interesting feature is that per capita spend in Inner London has also declined from £5,842 to £5,759 per capita in 2015-16. The drop isn’t across the board, but is greatest in Camden and Kensington and Chelsea. Tower Hamlets still tops the list with a spend of £6,842 per capita, down by some nine pounds per capita, but still some £350 ahead of Hackney, the next highest. (These figures exclude the single school in the City of London and on the Isles of Scilly where figures are much higher. However, it isn’t clear why the primary school in the City of London should receive £600 per pupil more than the average for schools in Tower Hamlets.)

Indications are that with increasing pupil numbers and the government’s commitment to austerity the 2016-17 budgets now being assembled at the macro level aren’t likely to be any more generous than this year, and might put schools under even more pressure at the per capita level. That will make free services like our TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk more valuable to schools than spending money on services that often increase in price every year regardless of inflation levels and technological changes.

Government sees history as more important than design & technology

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The new scheme to fund courses to attract returners to teaching in Ebacc subjects, but not in other shortage subjects such as design and technology and business studies, shows a government that values history more than encouraging the next generation to see the importance of the fashion, catering, engineering, electronics and many other industries. After all, design and technology as  asubject is facing a far greater teacher shortage problem than is history. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/461490/SRT_Pilot_Guidance_final.pdf

There is really no shortage of history teachers, at least in the State Sector, although I suppose they could be expected to teach Key Stage 3 humanities to relieve the looming shortage of geography teachers. But, what of Religious Education, IT and music, all other non-Ebacc subjects where there have been, are, or will be shortages. Don’t these subjects count in the curriculum any more to the Tories in government?

There is also an argument that the programme may be too late. The main recruitment cycle is between March and the end of May each year, but these courses might not finish until July. This means some taking the course might have to wait until January 2017 before finding a teaching post.

However, it marks a step in the right direction. Will training schools, the new orthodoxy for the location of training, have the space and resources at the price offered to run such courses? With no London price differential it seems likely schools in the capital will have to balance their recruitment needs with their ability to subsidise a course.

I am sure the intention of this programme is to increase returners, but it isn’t clear what market testing the National College has undertaken. Please could it not just be a ‘hit and hope’ activity where someone has identified returners as a possible group where supply could be increased, but not even bothered to look at JSA claimant counts for teachers across the country. I also hope that alongside this scheme there will be funds and encouragement for a return of KIT or Keep in Touch schemes for teachers on maternity leave. Yesterday, by chance, I met a teachers working on a national peer to peer self-development site that looks very interesting and innovative. It is just the sort of scheme the government might set up an innovation fund to help get off the ground. But that would be directly the opposite of the micro-managed approach taken with the Returner Scheme.

Keen readers of Hansard will also have noticed that the Labour opposition used the debate on Wednesday on the post-committee stage of the Bill to introduce the theme of teacher shortages and their effect on schools being cited as coasting. It is always gratifying when data one has produced is prayed in aid in the Chamber as part of the debate.

As ever, it is by the opposition, but hopefully there will also be a mention of TeachVac and its contribution to understanding the teacher supply situation sometime soon as it gains credibility as a free recruitment site to schools and teachers. Indeed, TeachVac can also help those returners the government scheme attracts to find their teaching post.

Off with the head

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I assume the call for parents to be able to remove heads issued by the New Schools Network in its evidence to the Select Committee inquiry into Regional School Commissioners is either a bit of headline grabbing or an attempt to legislate for what many active parents already do.

Indeed, when schools were responsible to local authorities there were parent and local authority governors that could and did act as a conduit for dissatisfaction among the parent and staff bodies if a school was under-performing. What the New Teacher Network seems to fail to understand, if I read the press reports correctly, is that it is the management of the school and not necessarily the head that may need to be changed when a school is failing. That’s why governments sack governing bodies in failing schools. Did they also consider the issue highlighted in the Bill presently before parliament of what to do with a ‘coasting’ academy or free school? The assumption that only the remaining community or voluntary schools ‘coast’, and academies and free school don’t, seems either naïve or politically motivated.

Now I have no objection to a single system of schools. I would prefer them to have local democratic oversight, but frankly, in a time of austerity, it is a waste of money to create two systems in parallel.

By the way, middle class parents that are anxious about whether their children’s schools are under-performing do take action and have done so for years. I know of two schools in the past year where groups of parents have put pressure on the governors and the head because they were worried about standards falling.

However, they, along with the New Schools Network, do have to consider that the post of head teacher must be attractive enough to encourage the next generation of teachers to want to take on the role. Indeed, the New Schools Network might do well to consider whether offering support to prevent problems becoming more serious is usually better than changing the leadership team. The decline in advisory services to schools into a traded option bought by schools may fit the market agenda but it makes early intervention before problems increase beyond the point of no return more challenging. Would a free school advisory board agree to support a head that indicated the need to spend money on staff development over a project that they favoured?

The current risk is that many schools will find improving performance more challenging if the recruitment and retention of teachers becomes yet more of a challenge into 2016.

There is also the pressure to prevent schools seeming to under-perform by parents paying for private tuition. I heard of one, I hope extreme case, where the parents of a pupil entering the sixth form with an A at GCSE were told to look for a private tutor by other parents in order for the child to be able to keep up with the A level pace. This was because, the lessons were pitched on the basis that parents would be doing so and anyone that didn’t would find themselves outpaced. Now, I hope that is a rare example, but it does demonstrate what a parent driven system can create. Is that the aim of the New Schools Network?

Admissions cause some concerns

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Now the website of the School Adjudicators isn’t high on my regular websites to visit. However, I recently paid it a visit to read the decision about admissions to Banbury Academy in Oxfordshire. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/banbury-academy The Adjudicator partially upheld the complains from another school in the town and the Conservative controlled county council in a detailed 23 page decision covering a whole range of admissions issues.

On my visit, I couldn’t help but notice that the Adjudicator had been a series of decisions through the summer. Indeed, since the end of July, the Adjudicator has upheld 13 complains and partially upheld a further nine, making 22 complaints upheld in full or part compared with 13 where complaints were not upheld. The majority of complaints not upheld were against admission arrangements in the primary sector. These were either for individual schools or in three cases arrangements made by local authorities. A complaint was upheld against one authority and partially upheld against another.
Academies were concerned in twelve of the complaints upheld either in full or in part and only in four cases were such complaints not upheld among the decisions reported upon since the end of July. There was a complaint against one ‘free’ school reported during this period, but it was not upheld.

Reading the decisions shows just what a minefield school admissions have become. They are set to become even worse if the rule about siblings is changed by the government to give them priority over children living near to a school. I recall a case of a popular village school where families would move in a rent a property, secure a place for their first child and then move to a cheaper location to buy a house secure in the knowledge they would be able to send other children to the school. The case was drawn to my attention when a five-year old living opposite the school gates had to be transported by taxi to another school as there was no place available at the local school. Now, the Conservative view seems to be that these schools can just expand. However, unless the rules on funding are changed, primary schools will be faced with either larger classes or cutting expenditure elsewhere to fund the places for siblings. The third alternative is for the local authority to find an alternative school and, if necessary, pay the transport costs to taxi young children around to satisfy the needs of other parents.

However, there are a group of parents that aren’t catered for in the present handling of the parental choice rules. These are families where one parent, and especially the mother, is not fully fit and has limited mobility for whatever reason. There is often no way in the admissions arrangements to handle such a situation because appeal panels aren’t not allowed discretion. In some other circumstances the use of the word ‘normally’ would provide room for manoeuvre, as it also would in handling sibling requests where parents don’t live as close to the school as other pupils unable to access the school. Providing panels gave reasons that could be tested this might help deal with some of the anomalies in the present system, as happens with transport appeals.

This problem is that when the number of pupils is on the increase not everyone will be satisfied with the outcome, whatever system is adopted.