The schools bill: from parental choice to politicians choosing

The threat to parental choice and good schools

On Monday and Tuesday the Schools Bill will be returning for Report Stage in the Commons. It’s a terrible bill, vandalising 40 years of cross party reform, without putting any coherent vision in its place. It rolls back some really fundamental reforms.

Some ancient history

In 1987 Mrs Thatcher announced that she would start to bring her agenda of choice and freedom to the school system. She said:

We will allow popular schools to take in as many children as space will permit. And this will stop local authorities from putting artificially low limits on entry to good schools.

And second, we will give parents and governors the right to take their children's school out of the hands of the local authority and into the hands of their own governing body. This will create a new kind of school funded by the State, alongside the present State schools and the independent private schools.

They will bring a better education to many children because the school will be in the hands of those who care most for it and for its future.

This agenda became known as “Local Management of Schools”. Did it work? Former Labour Education Minister Lord Adonis wrote:

“Local Management of Schools was an unalloyed and almost immediate success… school budgets under LMS were based largely on pupil numbers, so parental choice came to matter as never before.”

In contrast, during the debates over the Schools Bill current Labour ministers have said they believe in “standards not structures”.

This makes me groan. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair says in his memoirs:

“We had come to power in 1997 saying it was ‘standards not structures’ that mattered. We said this in respect of education, put it applied equally to health and other public services.

Unfortunately, as I began to realise, when experience shaped our thinking, it was bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes.

The Schools Bill

The Schools Bill (which is back in the Commons on 17 and 18 March) strikes at all the school reforms of the last 40 years.

One of the very biggest (and under-appreciated) changes it brings about is the undoing of that very first reform: the right of popular schools to grow.

Clause 50 of the Bill gives the local authority the ability to object if good schools want to grow - or even if an academy is proposing to keep its numbers the same.

The size of a school’s intake is known as its “Published Admission Number” (PAN).

The government’s impact assessment says of Clause 50 of the Bill:

“Demographic changes mean there is an increase in the number of surplus places in primary schools…. We want the local authority to have more influence over the PANs for schools in their area.

“This would include scenarios where… a school’s PAN is set at a level which creates viability issues for another local school”

This raises many, many questions, particularly (but not only) where there are many schools.

In a city like London there are about 2,800 schools. Cross authority moves are very, very common. So, let’s say if I have an excellent oversubscribed school - and meanwhile yours is requiring improvement and struggling to attract pupils - how on earth are you to know that it is my school that is “creating viability issues” for your school - rather than one of the other hundreds of schools nearby?

Indeed, even if we are out in the countryside, with fewer nearby schools, how are we to know that the “viability issues” are not entirely to do with the failing school? And in reverse, how are the pupils from a thriving school to be “shared out fairly” if there are multiple struggling schools in the area?

The impact assessment makes clear how much of a departure this is from the path we have been on since the reforms of the late 1980s, which gave good schools the ability to expand. The Impact Assessment says “The Adjudicator will also have the ability to set the PAN for the subsequent year… and:

“some schools may find that their PAN is not set for them as they would wish. They may feel that they are able to take more pupils and thus receive greater funding. It could also limit the ability of popular schools to grow.

“If a school is required to lower their PAN, some pupils who would have otherwise been admitted will be unable to attend the school. This will negatively impact on parental preference, especially if the school was the parent’s first choice.”

The Confederation of Schools Trusts have pointed out that the impact assessment does not “account for the potential risks of reducing PANs at popular and successful schools”.

Rather than the normal split between the regulator and the provider, Local Authorities will be both.

From parent power to politicians

Schools do close at present of course. But at the moment this is mainly driven by parents voting with their feet. More than eight out of ten secondary schools are academies and the local authority can only object to their admission numbers at present if they suddenly want to cut numbers (which is fine, as that would potentially create a problem for others).

Politicians in some local authorities have never liked school freedom, and it will be tempting for them to push down numbers in academies to protect the schools they run – even if they are not the best schools or the ones parents want.

For all the reasons that former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is positive about this I am very nervous about it.

In Committee, Government ministers argued that this clause is needed because “schools are unilaterally increasing their admission numbers beyond what is needed”.

For starters, that doesn’t explain why schools that just want to keep them the same are in scope. But it also begs a question. Schools can only expand if parents want to go there. So who is to say how many places are “needed” in a good school? Parents or local politicians?

Under the Schools Bill a local authority will be able to object to the current admission numbers of any school anywhere in the country. So there will be border disputes with LAs trying to push down numbers in neighbouring authorities. I suspect that faith and selective schools will be particularly in the crosshairs of the more ideological left wing authorities.

And there is nothing in the Bill to stop the Schools Adjudicator from being able to set a PAN to zero - to shut a school, or stop one from opening.

Where the risk to good schools is greatest

There are already local authorities that try to browbeat good schools into shrinking to prop up neighbours. But at present schools can become an academy and so immune from this. Under the Schools Bill, those local authorities will be able to get what they want.

This shift of power from parents to politicians will matter most in the places where the numbers of pupils are set to fall, and the number of “surplus” places is largest and growing fastest.

I have never liked this statist term. We don’t ask how many “surplus” places there are in a law firm or a bakery or a mobile phone network - or anywhere else that choice and dynamic free markets are allowed to operate. The only time you don’t have any “surplus” capacity is where you have a static, rationing-based system.

Nonetheless, this is the term the Treasury likes, and DFE compiles local forecasts of the number of “surplus” places. Obviously there are many more places in big local authorities than small ones, so the charts below are shown as a share of the current number of places.

The places where the Schools Bill is likely to pose most threat are the places where a) there is a big increase in the share of surplus places forecast and/or b) the level of surplus places is set to be high.

The two maps below those numbers for primary schools, where the challenge is currently most acute - the challenge will hit secondary schools a few years later.

First, here are the places forecasting a high share of surplus places in five years’ time. It’s highest in London, the north and the south west.

And here is the change in surplus places. As you can see, a few places will have fewer surplus places - like where I am writing from in Leicestershire, which is an oasis of blue. But again, London, the north and the south west have big increases in surplus capacity.

No choice, no voice

In the current choice-based system schools get to stay open or grow based on a) whether they can attract parents to choose them and b) how efficient they are. And they can become a lot better and more efficient by joining a really good trust.

In the future a school’s pupil numbers will instead depend on the views of local councillors again, as they did before Mrs Thatcher’s reforms.

Schools will still shut or shrink in either world. But under parental choice the places that shrink will be determined by people voting with their feet and how efficient schools are.

In contrast under the Schools Bill it will depend on the ideological / political views of local councillors. If we contrast inner London schools today, with how they were under the infamous Inner London Education Authority, this may not be a change for the better.

We tried to amend the Bill to at least require school performance to be taken into account when making decisions on pupil numbers, but amazingly the government voted this down. We will fight on in the Lords.