Schools for Scoundrels: What the New Rules on Admissions Really Mean

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when getting your child into the right school loomed less large in parents’ minds. Back in the 1970s, when league tables applied only to football teams and admissions policies primarily to night clubs, it was all so much simpler. Parents worried for a while before the day of judgement at age 11, but they didn’t start fretting about it while their children were still in nappies. Of course, the irrevocable and brutal 11-plus had many flaws, especially if your child had a bad cold on exam day, but at least you knew what was expected. Today’s parents are like mice in an ever-changing laboratory experiment, desperately trying to work out which tunnels to run down and which buttons to press to get the reward. There seems to be more choice now, but the plethora of school types and entry criteria, combined with the fear that some schools might better prepare children for an ASBO than an A-level, create a nagging anxiety that starts at birth and steadily intensifies to a near nervous breakdown by Year 6.

The good news is that selection criteria have become simpler with the government’s new guidelines on admissions policies. When allocating places for next year, schools won’t be able to interview parents or ask questions on admissions forms about who you are and what you do. So they’ll find it much harder to see how wealthy or well-educated you are. Being a partner in a law firm or hospital consultant shouldn’t cut any ice.

This leaves just two selection criteria for most parents to contend with, or manipulate, should they not like the look of their default school: where you live and what you believe.

Of the two (moving house or finding God), the former poses fewer ethical dilemmas, but with absurdly high property prices and significant premiums for living near the best state schools (as much as a third according to some studies) most of us can’t afford this option. In any case, with the increasing likelihood of allocation by lottery and no guarantee that the necessary proximity to schools won’t shrink as the best ones get more popular, moving house can be an unreliable remedy – even if you can afford that £500,000 terraced house near the one desirable state school in your area.

That leaves finding God as the only viable option for many parents. On the positive side, it’s probably more reliable than moving house and it’s even theoretically free (although if time equals money it can be expensive once you count those precious Sunday mornings spent in church). It does require a serious commitment, however, so before you get religion, do some careful research.

When you do, two things may happen. First, you confirm your hunch that the best local school is run by people with beliefs you rejected as ridiculous in your teens. Second, when you look at the other schools on offer you suddenly begin to find these beliefs strangely appealing again.

Finding faith like this is genuinely miraculous and proof that God really does work in mysterious ways. But can conversion, or the revival of a dormant childhood faith, be that simple? It seems so. Consider this. Only 6% of the UK population attend church on an average Sunday, yet 28% of our schools are faith schools. Given the pressure to attend church to get into these schools, a reasonable interpretation of these figures suggests a huge spike in attendance among parents with young children. So when you become part of this new Great Awakening, you’ll realise that God’s chosen people are not devout Christians, Muslims or Jews, they’re aspiring thirty-something former agnostics who haven’t been to church in earnest since they were 15.

The reassuring part is that you don’t have to worry about not fitting in. You’re more likely to find yourself discussing DIY than doctrine with fellow adherents. And with the Church of England now taking advice from John Lewis on how to improve the church-going experience, you’re unlikely to be subjected to any of that fire and brimstone nonsense that used to put you off your Sunday lunch. However, there is hard work and careful planning to be done if you are to accept your conversion.

First, one of the devilish tricky things about getting into a good faith school is that the selection process starts not at 10 or 4, as you might think, but at birth. Primary school may seem a long way off when your helpless bundle of joy is oozing milky slime on your shoulder, but neglect to baptise it at your peril. The later you leave it, the dodgier it looks to the faith police, not to mention friends and family. (How many four-year-olds have you seen in a font near you recently?) And who knows, there may even be fringe benefits to baptism. In addition to it going down well with the school, it may prevent your offspring’s descent into a fiery pit for all eternity should she not make it to fun-with-phonics in the reception class. Before you become attached to whichever brand of religion is revealed to you by the Ofsted website, however, do make sure that your new God is as local as you think. It would be a shame to have to dunk little Emily’s head in a different church font when you find that you actually live four yards too far away from St. Smartypants.

The next step is reconciling yourself to Sunday mornings spent kneeling in a pew instead of lying in bed, reading the paper. In fact, you may as well cancel the Sunday paper as a symbolic gesture of your commitment to the faith. You’ll never have time to read it anyway, now that you’ve added an hour of worship and half an hour of networking on the church steps to your already crowded weekend.

Now you’re probably thinking that such serious commitment is more than enough to get the coveted spiritual reference from your church leader. But for some highly competitive schools, even sacrificing several years of Sunday mornings might not win your child a place. The Church of England’s recent guidelines on selection criteria encourage its schools to discriminate between those ‘known to the church’, those ‘attached to the church’ and those ‘at the heart of the church’. So to convince the vicar that you belong in God’s premier league, you may need to sign up for many hours of volunteering (think of it as a kind of community service for all those years you didn’t go to church before you had children). For when it comes to school selection, the sins of the fathers (and mothers) count much more than the child’s. Your son could be a sonic screwdriver-wielding maniac, but if Mum is prepared to bake cakes for the church fete, or Dad helps raise a new barn (or whatever it is that Anglican Dads do) the budding psychopath will be welcomed with open arms.

Faced with entrance requirements like these, it’s no wonder parents are anxious. Getting a child into the best local school can be a difficult and unpredictable exercise. It takes luck, a lot of hard work and, despite the demise of the 11-plus, it may still involve rigorous testing. Only it’s not your child that’s being tested, it’s you. What’s more, you’re not even being assessed on your academic or parenting ability but on networking skills and a willingness to put your child’s future before your personal beliefs.

The new system has made things a little clearer, but it hasn’t resolved the main issues: widely variable quality of schools and exclusion by many of the best state schools on the grounds of religion. The new rules prevent most forms of discrimination but they give a free pass for faith schools to exclude pupils on the whim of a religious leader. I doubt whether most parents want to bring back the 11-plus, but given a choice between a straightforward exam and several years of schmoozing a senile priest that may not even remember your name when it comes to putting pen to paper, I know which one I’d rather have.