Quality | 2009.11.06
Holy texts and lineage are no way to assemble state schools | Simon Jenkins
The primitive barring of a child on ethnic grounds is the nadir of the pursuit of \'choice\'. Pupils should go local, warts and all
Soon we shall cry, come back 11-plus , all is forgiven. The spectacle of the supreme court trying this week to decide whether racial purity should be the basis for admission to state education shows how close we still are to the dark ages. If I had to choose between putting my child through a test of the three Rs or trying to prove his mother\'s maternal bloodline, give me the three Rs any day.
The case of the London Jewish Free School (JFS), now before the supreme court, should never have been brought to trial. There is something primitive about religious adherence or ethnicity conferring privilege in state education. That this should be the result of Labour government legislation is extraordinary.
The 2006 act governing school admissions clearly states that, where a school is oversubscribed, its governors may discriminate by selecting on grounds of religion. This has driven a coach and horses through the comprehensive principle that state pupils go to their local school, as happens in most normal democratic countries.
In the case currently before the court, a 13-year-old applicant to the JFS had an Orthodox Jewish father and worshipped at an Orthodox synagogue. His mother thought she was Jewish, but only by conversion at a non-Orthodox ceremony. This made the son not Jewish enough for a school place, in the eyes of the JFS.
Lord Pannick, counsel for the school, argued that the 2006 act left the definition of religious conformity "to the faith provider or religious authority". The question was thus not of ethnicity but of the rules of Orthodoxy. A lower court had rejected this argument since no authority could exempt itself from the race relations act, under which British Jews had specifically asked to be included as a people, not as a religious group.
What is ominous for the JFS is that the mother would have been in the clear had she been able to plead matrilineal Jewish descent (she was born a Catholic). By rejecting her, the JFS had passed judgment on her ethnicity, not her religious observance, even though that was not itself in doubt. On such arcaneness must the supreme court decide.
If a church or school or club wants to be exclusive, whether by race, sex, affinity or cigars, I believe society should be robust enough to stand the strain. We can express disapproval of the behaviour of others without having always to call in the law. But I am against eccentricity or exclusivity being validated with public money.
It is preferable for a state school admission system to be based on locality. Schools are cohering local institutions, for richer, for poorer, and that is how admission is determined across most of the globe. If aptitude or ability are to be criteria, as was the ambition of the 11-plus, let the test be public and fair. It is not reasonable for admission to be based on parental class, background, faith or group affiliation. Those who want such schools can pay for them. Many do. It is a free country.
When I went to primary school, I went with everyone from my village. The school happened to belong to the Church of England, symbolised in a brief morning prayer, but it was for all. In large towns with more than one school, local authorities allocated children by catchment areas. While there were arguments over boundaries, and some (much exaggerated) house movement, it was basically fair.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the discipline of local catchment eroded, as white flight sought ever more devious ways of avoiding high-immigrant inner-city schools. Successive governments introduced the concept of "choice", and middle-class parents besieged church schools as havens of collective security. These schools were oversubscribed and found themselves not chosen but doing the choosing. Admissions criteria – and covert charging – became the rage.
The pews of London churches with school nominations were soon packed with desperate parents. Others were emptied of their congregations. In 2006, the government attempted to legislate that a mere 20% of places in church schools should go to non-worshippers. By then the pass had been sold, and even that was too many for the church lobby. The minister, Alan Johnson , capitulated as, more recently, has Ed Balls. Across a third of English schools, the Labour party has handed back to the church the keys to the door of the bourgeoisie.
Urban vicars, with hundreds of desirable school places in their pockets, are the new, mostly regressive, social engineers. Their discretion is remarkable. Some allow prospective parents who go to weekend "second home" churches in the country to include this in their attendance score. The arrival of prominent Tories at a fashionable church school in London surprised local parents whose hours of communion at the same altar had proved educationally unproductive.
From the moment "choice of school" gained traction under John Major, the old tensions resumed. In one area of London\'s Camden, a local church is full with applicants for places at its associated primary while a nearby secular school must take imports from outside the neighbourhood to fill its rolls. The result could well be a London neighbourhood whose youthful population is divided between a Christian school and a predominantly Muslim one, an apartheid directly financed by the state. This is what is causing ongoing anguish in Northern Ireland.
The 1944 Education Act was a response to such social divisiveness. It sought to end the educational class system with a universal pattern of local primary schools, and with transfer to secondary schools by a test at 11. The test would supposedly be blind to a child\'s achievement at primary school or its parental background. There was no question of parental choice.
The 11-plus was abolished because thousands of middle-class parents were enraged at being denied access to their local grammar school when a child failed the exam. That was why the Tories swore never to reintroduce it and accepted comprehensive education – until leaders arrived who had forgotten, or never known, the battles of the 1960s.
Now to have parents roaming the country looking for an ever "better" school reopens the can of worms that 11-plus selection tried, but failed, to close. Allied to the pernicious league tables, so-called choice has left popular schools and eager parents in an unholy alliance to maintain the quality of intake and reject unsuitable pupils. Both know that it is enrolment that separates star schools from sink ones.
As schools get ever more cunning in selecting bright pupils, it is easy to see what happens next. The public will protest and the government will insist on a national admissions test to promise a level playing field. It may not be called the 11-plus, but that is what it will be.
Children should go to their local school, primary and secondary, warts and all. It does not matter how a school is run, but it does matter how the state allots places in what are public institutions. Labour\'s crude attempt to ingratiate itself with middle-class voters has ended in a ridiculous court case. If tests there must be, let them be proper ones, not recitations of holy texts or mother\'s birth certificates.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]dmissions-labour-policy-jewish
