Witchfinder Balls
The victimisation of faith schools by the Children’s Secretary Ed Balls is a real shocker, even by the standards of this administration. Balls has repeatedly claimed that dozens of faith schools have broken the admission rules. One in six state schools is guilty of selecting pupils by the back door, he says, and claims in particular that such schools even made places conditional on parents agreeing to pay for various services. Even though Balls subsequently admitted he hadn’t checked his facts when he first made this claim, he continues to make it and indeed has even stepped up the rhetoric.
In fact, only seven primary schools fit this claim and they are all in the London borough of Barnet. But there isn’t a shred of evidence that voluntary payments made by parents influenced admissions at any of these schools. A statement by Barnet council says:
In total 7 primary schools made reference to voluntary contributions on their form. Four Jewish primary schools asked for contributions for Jewish Studies and Security and three other faith primary schools asked for voluntary contributions to support contributions to the Diocese. However the seven primary schools involved confirm that information about voluntary contributions has not been used in the allocation of places. Voluntary contributions have therefore had no bearing on admission to any of Barnet's primary schools.
In relation to community schools three issues were raised. Two related to oversubscription criteria in relation to children in care applying for entry into the sixth form in two schools. Barnet Council can confirm that all looked after children in the care of Barnet, or any other authority, were given their first choice of placement both for the sixth form and when starting secondary school.
The remaining issue was that one school included reference to an ‘interview’ for the performing arts programme. The selection process does include an audition and as part of that process staff do meet applicants but this does not constitute an interview as we understand the term to be used in the Schools Admission code. The term interview has been removed for the 2009 selection and we can confirm that no interviews have taken place and no child has been disadvantaged.
Balls’s claims are simply quite outrageous. If faith schools ask for voluntary contributions, they do so because the state only funds the secular education they provide. Religious education has to be funded from the schools’ own resources. Moreover, Jewish schools need to find the money to pay for the security for their pupils made necessary because of the ever present danger they face of attack. For Balls to accuse them of demanding cash for places and effectively blackmailing parents simply because they ask them to contribute towards the cost of guarding their children, whose security Balls’s own government cannot guarantee, is just grotesque.
The real reason for this disgraceful attack lies in a combination of cynicism and ideological spite. Balls needed a smokescreen to divert attention from the fact that his admissions policy is failing. As the Tories’ impressive schools spokesman Michael Gove has set out, two written statements were made by Balls’s department on 11 March. One confirmed that one in five parents failed to get their first choice of school and the second announced the results of an analysis of admissions procedures in three local authorities. In the latter, Balls stated:
Practices revealed in our survey which are non-compliant with the Code include: schools asking parents to commit to making financial contributions as a condition of admission.When asked if the simultaneous release of the two sets of data were linked, Schools Minister Jim Knight replied:
Well it is essentially a coincidence. (Newsnight, BBC, 11 March 2008).Yeah, right. To deflect public criticism, Balls turned his guns on schools which, in the demonology of the unreconstructed Stalinist class warriors of the left, combine unforgiveably the crimes of high standards (thus highlighting the grievous failings of the majority of schools under Balls’s control including, incidentally, the one which his own children attend which is now in ‘special measures’), religious and moral principles creating an orderly ethos (which similarly shame the rest) and the provision of an escape route for those enemies of levelling-down, the middle classes, who are desperate to send their children to schools where they might actually have a chance of a decent education. But of course, according to the sacred doctrine of the equality of misery, that must not be allowed.
As a result, as Gove so rightly says, Balls has launched a witch-hunt against schools whose only fault is to show up the bankruptcy of his own ideology. Shameful.