The Observer view on equality in schools

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/04/state-private-schools-education-equality

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Latin at comprehensives can now join lobster from Lidl and champagne from Aldi in the list of money-saving tips Tatler has produced for its wealthy but price-conscious readers. Last week, it published a guide to the nation’s most socially exclusive state schools, cheerfully declaring “freedom from feedom”. But according to Alun Jones, president of the Girls’ School Association, Tatler-perusing parents buying expensive houses in the catchment areas of excellent state schools are exercising a greater form of privilege than those who send their children to a private school.

Jones’s intervention was a thinly veiled attempt to deflect criticism from a private sector feeling under siege in the wake of Tristram Hunt’s announcement that a Labour government would expect private schools to do more earn to their charitable status. But Jones has a point. There has been more political scrutiny of the private sector’s impact on educational inequality than on the privileged access children from more affluent backgrounds have to the country’s best state schools.

Both need addressing: while statistics about the advantage a private sector education buys are better known, research from the Sutton Trust shows that the country’s top 200 state schools have much lower-than-average proportions of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, the London Oratory, the school Tony Blair and Nick Clegg chose for their children, has an intake of disadvantaged children proportionately five times smaller than the number in its local community. But it has been easier for politicians to champion solutions to the former than the latter: private schools as benefactors is easier to achieve, politically, than opening up the best state schools to a more diverse group of children.

Creating more socially mixed state schools is by no means a panacea for closing the attainment gap for children from poor backgrounds. Indeed, Ofsted data show that, as a result of low expectations allowing them to coast, poor children in good schools in affluent areas suffer worse than those in excellent schools in inner-city areas. Mixing school intakes cannot alone make up for the fact that there are still too many mediocre schools, or that an outstanding school with a middle-class intake may have little experience of teaching more socially diverse groups of children.

But creating a more socially integrated education system should be an end in itself, given the critical role schools play in developing the citizens and parents of the future. The road to a more cohesive, tolerant society must surely start in our schools: we can’t simply hope it will somehow materialise when a lack of social, ethnic or religious diversity too often goes unchallenged.

Yet reforming school admissions is notable for its absence in both of the main parties’ education agendas. Indeed, the coalition government has devolved school admissions policies to academies, creating a more fragmented system that some oversubscribed schools have been able to exploit to operate behind-closed-doors social selection. Its answer to social mixing lies in its National Citizen Service scheme, but can a two-week residential course for 16-year-olds really teach respect in the same way as a childhood spent learning alongside children from different backgrounds?

This debate on the left too often descends into an implicit hectoring of middle-class parents using their greater means to get what’s best for their children. But who could criticise parents for wanting to do the best for their children? Instead, it is up to the state to play a greater role in opening up access to the best state schools: for example, by considering requiring oversubscribed schools to make greater use of random ballots and ability banding in school admissions. This would need to sit alongside continuing measures to improve the quality of teaching and leadership in underperforming schools; and to ensure schools have high expectations for all children, regardless of background.

Together, these reforms could improve prospects for the most disadvantaged children, but also turn out better-educated young people in more than one sense of the word. Instead, the education system has over the last four years been subject to huge cuts to the services that support some of the most vulnerable children and damaging upheaval as a result of the coalition’s fervent obsession with structural reform.