5/13/2008 8:37:00 AM
Fiona Millar; The Guardian 13 May
The education bill brings us one step closer to making schools fairer, says Fiona Millar .The past few weeks have seen newspaper accounts of a father throwing himself in front of a train, a family being hounded by surveillance tactics usually reserved for terrorists, and a mother handing her child over to the guardianship of a relative in a different area. These are not reports of the latest soap opera, simply the latest examples of the extreme stress that can arise from parental choice colliding with the rationing of school places. The subject just won't go away, will it? Today the third reading of the education and skills bill brings new measures designed to make the system fairer. They aren't exactly being shouted from the rooftops, possibly due to the public mauling that followed Ed Balls's naming and shaming of schools that were flouting the new admissions code. There was something slightly hypocritical and cowardly about his decision to point the finger at tiny Jewish primary schools requiring a financial contribution (shocking as that may be) while publicly endorsing the overt selection of the 164 grammar schools by announcing that their heads would get yet more money to "support" the local secondary moderns, whose problems they help to create. However, the subsequent actions, incorporated in today's amendments to the education bill, are significant. They mark a further erosion of the pre-2006 act government position that there is no such thing as covert social selection (which meant even the London Oratory's interviews were blindly defended on faith grounds), and a strengthening of the schools adjudicator and the code he upholds. Once the bill is passed, local authorities will be obliged to report all admission arrangements in their areas to the adjudicator's office, which can then decide if they fall foul of the code.Guardian
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