Faith schools should be stripped of their power to choose pupils, according to research that suggests that some secondary schools are flouting new rules designed to prevent middle-class pupils dominating the best comprehensives.
Researchers at the London School of Economics, who studied more than 3,000 secondary school admission forms for 2008, said that faith schools and other establishments that control admissions, including academies, should hand over the job of allocating places to an independent body to ensure greater fairness. Anne West, director of the education research group at the LSE and lead author of the study, said that this could be the local authority, which already controls admissions for community schools, or a religious body such as the diocesan authority.
The new chief adjudicator for schools, Ian Craig, responded by warning schools that are breaking rules by selecting pupils covertly that they will be found out.
Craig, who takes up the post responsible for policing admissions in April, told the Guardian: "If they [schools] are still breaking the code they will be found out quite quickly... we will be sampling schools and reporting to the secretary of state."
The researchers found that some schools were operating a form of backdoor selection by asking for personal information about parents’ marital status, occupation and educational background and even children’s hobbies. It also found that a significant minority of nonselective schools – 5 per cent – were selecting pupils on the basis of aptitude for a particular subject.
Professor West said that despite the introduction of an admissions code in 2007 to outlaw backdoor selection several schools had breached the rules in letter and in spirit.
The study, which was funded by the education charity RISE and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, found that some schools were using supplementary information forms to ask parents open-ended questions, which would indicate a great deal about the parents’ own educational and social background.
Several schools asked about children’s hobbies and one even asked children to complete a 100-word statement. Another invited parents to meet the headteacher or deputy “to discuss the application for admission”, despite a ban on interviews.
A small number of grammar schools (15 per cent) asked about parents’ marital status through indirect questions, which is also against the rules.
The sheer complexity of admissions procedures discriminated against certain groups of parents, the report suggests. More than a fifth of voluntary aided schools have at least four admissions criteria relating to religion and some have as many as 11.
Closely tied to this, Professor West said, was the wide degree of discretion open to schools that controlled their own admissions. “Schools that are their own admission authority are in theory in a position to ‘cream skim’. This means that they are able, if they so wish, to select pupils who will maximise their examination league table results,” she said. “We do not know what is going on behind closed doors. We do not know what happens in voluntary aided schools and how it is decided whether or not a particular applicant is offered a place.”
The study found that the proportion of secondary schools selecting pupils by aptitude had risen from 3 per cent to 5 per cent between 2001 and 2008.
Nonselective schools that specialise in specific subject areas may select up to 10 per cent of their intake by aptitude. The LSE study found that some schools used prior attainment, for example in music examinations, as an indicator of aptitude. This, Professor West suggested, was tantamount to selecting by ability.
Faith authorities were highly critical of the report. The Rev Janina Ainsworth, chief education officer for the Church of England, told the Times that she thought the study was based on out-of-date information and denied that the procedures for deciding a child’s religious affiliation were complex or that schools had too much discretionary power.
“Church attendance is the only measure our schools use when allocating places on the basis of faith, and you cannot get a much simpler way of assessing whether someone has a faith commitment or not,” she said.
Campaigners for better faith schools pointed out that The RISE research was about this year's cohort of year 7s and so “hardly out of date”.
“Whilst it is true that there has been a new admissions code since then (last month) the information and analysis presented by West still stands. There is no reason to think that the minority of schools that failed to meet the statutory requirements in 2008 would do better under the stricter 2009 code” a spokesperson for the Accord coalition told Ekklesia.
Chair of Accord, Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain said: “We agree with the authors of the report that while there has been progress in the way that school admissions are determined, tackling covert selection should still be a priority for the government.
Voluntary aided schools—which are overwhelmingly religious—control their own admissions arrangements. This can lead to a serious conflict of interest, particularly in an education culture focused on success in the league tables, when a strong intake will lead to better results and behaviour.
“The report suggests that faith school admissions should be administered by an independent body according to simple, objective criteria that are the same between schools. This would certainly be a step forward from the current situation, with parents sometimes required to meet a bewildering number of religious criteria, including discretionary or open-ended questions.
“But while simplifying and centralising religious admissions might address some of the issues around covert selection in faith schools, it still won’t tackle the fundamental problem: that it is wrong for schools to divide children by their beliefs, or those of their parents. We therefore call on the Government to change the law so that schools are open to all families in their community”
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Accord Coalition: http://www.accordcoalition.org.uk/
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