In thousands of calendars across the length and breadth of England, 1 March will have a circle around it to mark that today is national offer day – when children find out where they will be starting secondary school in September. Some will greet their missives from the council with relief and even joy, marking the end of an ordeal that has lasted for months or even years. For others the news will bring disappointment and perhaps a rancorous appeals process.
After more than three decades of policy promoting school choice, the rituals are well established. Every autumn, secondary schools host open days and pump out literature, wooing the next cohort of prospective students, as well as the keenest families scouting their options a year or two in advance. Parents are encouraged to do their own research, consulting league tables and inspection reports, often supplemented with a good deal of school-gate gossip. Application forms ranking between three and six schools have to be submitted by the end of October, before a four-month wait for a verdict. The dates are different, but the process is similar for primary schools.
As I grew up in Scotland, all of this was alien to me before I began researching it. In Scotland, the vast majority of students go to their local catchment school by default, although around one in eight make a “placing request” for a different school. That reflects the different approach Scottish policymakers have taken, resisting marketisation where governments in England have embraced it.
The English system was constructed with the best of intentions. Making schools compete for students was meant to incentivise them to up their game. Giving families more choice was meant to create empowered consumers. Yet it has not quite worked out that way. The evidence, from England and abroad, suggests such measures have had minimal impact on educational attainment and have worsened class-based segregation between schools. Far from giving people a sense of control, the process has created a maelstrom of anxiety and disenchantment.
English policymakers cannot have anticipated the psychological toll of choosing a school. In interviews for my PhD research, which compares school choice in England and Scotland, English parents routinely described the experience as “stressful”, “frantic”, “a nightmare”. They spoke of being “dizzy”, overwhelmed and consumed by it. They put hours of work into it. One mum cancelled almost all her social engagements for a couple of months. Another delayed her return to full-time work until the application was in.
The pressure can be extreme. Some told me about suffering sleepless nights. A mother from Poland said that picking a school felt almost as momentous as deciding to come to the UK. Perhaps the most heart-rending story I encountered was the homeless father who felt guilty that he lacked the mental energy to engage with his son’s school choice:. “It does weigh heavily on me,” he said. “Sometimes I’m just so preoccupied just getting by day-to-day that it goes in the back of my mind and niggles me.” Such feelings are amplified by social pressure – I was told by a different parent that “if you don’t put that time into it you’re not bothered about your child’s education”.
While those that make placing requests could identify with some of those feelings, for most Scottish families the transition to secondary school is relatively serene. In fact, Scottish parents tended to be shocked and somewhat horrified by the English system when I described it to them. Parents on both sides of the border generally try to shield their children from worry and uncertainty, but there are clear benefits to having advance notice of where you will be going. For example, a family in Dundee described how through a series of visits they were able to gradually ease their son with autism into his new school, a process that would have to be substantially compressed in England.
There are steps that could be taken to make school choice more tolerable. Policymakers could reduce some of the uncertainty around school admissions by guaranteeing each child a place at a local catchment school so that they always have a clear backstop. They could expand the number of places, especially at the most popular schools. This would reduce the proportion of students that fail to get their first choice school, currently 19% and likely to rise given a demographic bulge in the coming years, and in turn assuage families’ fears of missing out. They could bring back choice advisers, professionals whose role was to help families navigate the complexity of the process.
Could the government in England go further by taking a leaf out of Scotland’s book and trying to limit school choice? Perhaps, but it will be hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle. English parents, used to the system, may resist efforts to take back their perceived rights. That said, New Zealand reintroduced catchment areas in 2000 after abolishing them for many schools in 1991, showing that school choice need not be a one-way ratchet. In any case, with such strong social norms having developed around actively choosing a school, the extent to which a change of policy would alter parents’ mindsets and approaches is uncertain.
Aveek Bhattacharya is chief economist at the Social Market Foundation, a cross-party thinktank
