Teachers warn of 'ghetto' schools

The government's education bill risks creating 'ghettos' where disadvantaged children are forced to stay in schools shunned by the middle classes, a teachers' union warns today.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), argues plans to increase choice by introducing competition will not work and could even lead to further segregation in the state school system.

"The danger is that those who need the best education to increase their life chances will be left at the margins, in schools with unbalanced intakes, inadequate resources and poor attainment," she will tell delegates at the union's annual conference in Gateshead.

In her opening speech this evening, Dr Bousted will also warn that efforts to expand the involvement of the business sector in schools and further education colleges must be stopped.

Under plans outlined in the education bill, all state schools would be able to set up self-governing trusts, in partnership with local businesses, while a similar arrangement is also planned for colleges under the further education bill published last month.

The aim of these proposals is to extend the freedoms currently available to city academies to all schools, to allow the popular ones to expand and innovate, and force the poorly performing ones to either adapt by linking up with good schools, or close.

But today Dr Bousted will warn that good schools will never be able to expand to meet unlimited demand, while the pressure to compete, coupled with increased freedom from local government control, will lead schools to exclude the most disadvantaged children.

"The trouble with choice is that those least able to choose find that, if the market rules, it tends to prioritise those consumers which do not take up too many of its resources," she will say.

ATL has welcomed plans within the education bill to strengthen admissions codes to stop schools interviewing parents, to give teachers more powers to discipline children and impose a new duty for schools to educate excluded pupils.

But today Dr Bousted warns these are "straws in the wind against the prevailing gale", and says working class parents and their children "will find nothing in the education bill which will help them achieve more from the state education system".

"The government says there are too many secondary schools that do not produce good enough outcomes for their pupils. I agree," she will say.

"But I say that the explanation for this failure lies not in the low expectations of teachers or poor classroom practice, but in ghetto schools with unbalanced intakes serving a disaffected and disenfranchised underclass. Will anything in the bill help solve this issue? No."