Schools lottery to foil 'rich' parents
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Your support makes all the difference.Top state schools are to be encouraged to choose their pupils by lottery to thwart middle-class parents who "buy" their children places by moving house.
All the well-known stratagems, such as taking a tape measure to a local street map to work out the exact boundaries of a school catchment area, renting a false address close to the best school in the locality or paying £100,000 extra for a house overlooking the playground, could turn out to matter less than the luck of the draw.
An independently supervised lottery will give the child from the sink estate across town exactly the same chance of a place in the best school as the child of middle- class parents living a short walk away.
To make sure the scheme is not frustrated by the cost of transport, the Government will also make sure there are free school buses for those who need them.
The plan will infuriate homeowners who have been made hundreds of thousands of pounds richer by the effect a school with a good reputation has on local house prices.
The Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, is determined to end what she sees as hidden injustices in the secondary school system that give children from deprived backgrounds no real choice but to accept a place at the nearest secondary school. She is due to publish a White Paper this month that will shake up the whole admissions process.
She told last week's Labour Party conference: "For too long, access to some schools was open only to those who could afford to buy an expensive house next to a good school while the rest were told to accept what they were given. There was nothing fair about that approach."
The lottery is being pioneered by a secondary school in south-east London, Haberdashers' Aske's, which received almost 2,500 applicants for not many more than 200 places this year.
A spokesman for the Department of Education confirmed that other schools with exceptional numbers of pupils chasing every place would also be encouraged to use "random allocation".
Other proposals in the White Paper include encouraging the spread of "banding", under which 11-year-olds are tested and graded for their academic ability. The system is already used by some local councils to limit the proportion of top-grade pupils any school can take and compel them to take a minimum number with the lowest grades.
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