UPDATE: Harry Brighouse, Mike Baker and Fiona Millar all have their say. All good stuff. Here's an excerpt from CT comments:
Essentially most of the selection criteria remain the same, and selection is still limited to those in catchment, with the single change that the factor ‘closeness-to-school’ has been replaced by ‘random selection’ (still within catchment, and still balanced against other factors such as siblings’ school location, exceptional circumstances etc).
I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with this change, because ‘closeness-to-school’ is a factor that is by definition manipulable by parents, and more importantly, more easily manipulable by wealthier parents. A defensible choice agenda has to pay SOME attention to the ease and difficulty with which people can make the relevant choices, otherwise the resulting distribution looks likely be inegalitarian, right?
Now, on to my own thoughts. My first one is that I'm very much in favour of school lotteries, as it'll cut down on people like Ladyfriend and I from moving to where the good schools are, and will force the middle class to use voice to improve the schools they're stuck with rather than exit to congregate at the best state schools. As for the fear that the middle class will abandon state schools, I ain't buying. Only 7% of the school population attend independent schools, and they are generally very expensive - too expensive for most middle class parents. Tony Blair and his gang forget this - they seem to assume that most of the middle class is in a similar income bracket as themselves (a mistake also made by the odious Nick Cohen in his incessant rants about how hard life is for couples who earn 'only' 100k between them.) Here in the real world, most of the middle class can afford the partial exit of moving to where the best school are, but not the full exit of leaving the state school system entirely. And as for the idea that so long as the middle class's kids are in state schools, everything's hunky dory: bollocks! When some state schools are full of middle class kids and other state schools only a few miles away are full of low income kids, it's a de facto indepent private school system, but at taxpayer expense.
However, the beeb has an article saying that there's research arguing that lotteries don't actually level the playing field. The article is quoted below, but as far as I can tell, it says very little about the issue at hand. Perhaps the Beeb was just looking for something, anything, and thought this was enough?
Dr Jarvis said: "Our research suggests that lotteries of over-subscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds - greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents."
[....]She and Dr Alvanides looked at 50 primary schools in Newcastle and selected two for intensive study, one in an affluent part of the city, the other in a deprived area.
They worked closely with 10 families from one school and eight from the other.
All but two of the 18 had been allocated a place at their "first choice" school.
None of the poorer families owned a car and walked their children to school, whereas most of the affluent families had two cars and drove there.
When preparing their applications almost all the poorer families had visited just one school, their priority being a "happy child". They paid little heed to future secondary school transfers.
The better-off families had visited two or more, some going to five or more - including private schools - in their search for a "good school". They spent a lot on after-school activities.
The researchers believe they have uncovered significant lessons, most importantly on "the false view that policy makers have of the way parents in different walks of life make choices (assuming they have choices to make) about their children's education".
