Choice means going to nearest school... or paying to travel
THE recent debate over whether parents should be happy if their child is allocated a place at Fearns school in Bacup raises an important point about the myth of school placements here in Rossendale.
The myth is that, if you’re a parent, you have a choice about which school you send your child to.
You’re even expected to fill in a form, putting in order your preferences.
But if you don’t go to the school allocated to you, and opt instead for one further away, it’s down to you as a parent to pay to get your child to and from school.
That’s resulted in one parent, Louise O’Leary, sending her daughter on a 90-minute journey each way every day to school after Ebony was allocated a place at Fearns.
Louise had put Haslingden High School, Alder Grange or Whitworth High as the choices for Ebony, but all were oversubscribed, so Fearns was the one offered.
Louise raised her concerns in the Free Press a fortnight ago, and last week parents of pupils at Fearns got in contact with the Free Press to praise the school, and the work headteacher Helen Stead, who is trying to improve the school after a damning Ofsted report a couple of years ago.
That parents are rallying around Fearns is good news, very good news in fact.
As I wrote over a year ago, I think Fearns has been left to solve its own problems by an inspection regime who would have been better actively helping improve the school’s challenges rather than just shouting about them.
But the whole premise of choosing a secondary school is that you get to choose, and Louise O’Leary’s case teaches us two things about that.
The first is that in Rossendale, choice really means going to the school nearest to you or sending your child outside the borough – and paying the associated travel costs.
Different schools specialise in different things, and if your child is a particularly strong budding scientist, we should have a system which enables them to go to the local school which is strongest in that.
Lancashire county council rules stipulate that children receive free bus travel to high school if their nearest suitable high school is more than three miles away.
That rule in itself makes the idea of choosing a secondary school little more than a joke.
If Fearns is your nearest school, but you want your child to go to another school because of your child’s particular needs, you know you have to pay for that privilege.
Lancashire county council – as a cost-cutting measure – has now removed an exemption to this rule around faith schools.
Until recently, bus travel to your nearest faith school was subsidised.
On one hand, that’s made the system fairer, but it’s a system which knocks dead the idea of choice for parents – unless you have the cash to fund daily bus journeys.
In short, it creates a postcode lottery for parents, and that in turn plays havoc with the housing market, pushing up prices in areas where you’re likely to get into popular schools, which in turn makes it less likely developers will build in areas with less popular schools.
In isolation, LCC’s school bus policy may sound like a small affair.
Seen as part of a bigger picture, it causes a chain of events which runs the risk of children not reaching their full potential, and only parents with enough money being able to really choose the right school for their child.