Scrapping catchment areas 'would help poor'
Friday, 17 November 2006 12:00 AM
Catchment areas should be scrapped to give poorer children a chance to go to better schools, a Conservative policy group has proposed.
It warned that by only allowing pupils to attend local schools, problems in poor areas were made worse and the 'cycle of deprivation' was repeated across generations.
"If you're living on a rather poor estate, let us say, with one rather failing school on it, or one very unpopular school on it, then you don't really have a choice of good education unless you can go outside your catchment area," co-chairwoman Baroness Perry said.
The peer, a former chief inspector of schools, told Today: "What I would like to see is that the same choice that middle-class parents have, when they can sell their houses, move and get near a good school, I want that same choice for everyone."
However, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) insisted local authorities must be able to use catchment areas as a way of dealing with oversubscription to schools.
A spokesman stressed it was committed to "fairness and transparency" in school admissions but said councils must have the flexibility to decide admissions.
The Conservative public services improvement group notes that access to the most successful schools is determined "more by where parents live than by any other factor".
The interim report says: "The criteria for social housing all too often result in problem families being concentrated in a particular area, with access to only one school, infamously described as 'bog-standard', which then bears the total burden of the most difficult social group.
"Socially excluded households are seldom able to provide any support to their children or to the school, and it is small wonder that the 'cycle of deprivation' is repeated from one generation to the next."
Baroness Perry acknowledged that abolishing catchment areas - which could be backed up with free transport to bus pupils to their school of choice - could see pupils living near a good school deprived of their places.
"That certainly might, in the early stages, be something that we have to just live with, but there will have to be some mixing of opportunity for those who haven't had opportunity before with those who always have," she said.
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