Choice. Everyone's talking about it these days. We're no longer patients, parents or pupils, but consumers entitled to get the personalised service we demand. But are we? No one seriously doubts that parents should have the right to information and some influence over which schools their children might attend. But do we really have complete choice? Politicians of all parties link choice to the idea of ‘diversity', but in fact there is remarkable uniformity in the English school system.
Most primary schools are co-educational and share a common national curriculum. Every child in state funded education takes the same tests in the same year wherever they are in the country.
The situation is slightly complicated at secondary level by the different types of school; faith, selective, non selective, academies, specialist schools, city technology colleges, co-ed schools, single sex schools, schools that wear uniform, those that don't.
This suggests that parents have a lot to choose from. But the national curriculum still applies in secondary schools and is driven by yet more tests and exams.
So in practice whatever age their children are, parents are choosing between schools that deliver this standard academic model of success – based on SATs tests and GCSE results – more or less successfully within different contexts such as intake, environment, proximity from home, faith, ethnic or gender balance.
Moreover schools can't be run like Tescos. They can't stack up places like baked bean tins and just keep filling the shelves every time consumers want more. Nor is it realistic for them to hold empty places and thus deprive other schools of the money they may need.
A recent study by economists at Bristol University concluded that parents could only have absolute choice in schools if schools were able to expand and contract at will.
Without that they found children tend to get ‘sorted' into different schools, with the most disadvantaged ending up in the most challenging schools.
This ‘sorting' process is one that parents will understand well if they live in an area where too many are chasing too few places in popular schools.
In some parts of the country allowing every child a place in his or her preferred choice would lead to schools of two or three thousand pupils, almost certainly destroying the ethos and character of the school that the parent had chosen in the first place.
In reality parents can only exercise a preference and it would be better if we were honest about this and created a system that allowed parents to exercise that preference, which will almost certainly be for a good local school, fairly?
The most recent large scale study about choice by Which? found that 95 per cent of parents want a good local school near to where they live.
This has been borne out in other surveys and evidence from school campaigns around the country where parents have been united in the view that they didn't want to choose between good or bad schools or indeed compete with other parents to get into the more popular ones, only to then face a long and often disappointing appeals process. Nor did they want to send their children miles on public transport every day.
According to the Which? survey parents share a core idea of what makes a good local school – good teaching and discipline, strong leadership, good facilities and decent exam results
For many parents surveyed, the good local school was one that other parents had confidence in. Peer group perception was as important to many parents as a league table position.
In many parts of the country, especially in rural communities, parents have good community schools and distance makes nonsense of choice anyway.
But in some urban areas where the market in schools is very active, parents are often faced with a popular school on their doorstep which they can't get into because it practices selective admissions.
Or they may face a local school that has been deprived of the most able and motivated pupils, who have taken advantage of selective schools elsewhere, and which faces a range of challenging social problems.
If we want to give most parents what they want – a good local school – we need more fairness in the secondary school admission system so that some schools can't pick and choose their pupils at the expense of others.
Then we should move the focus away from creating different types of school and back to focussing on what goes within schools rather than between them.
Giving parents the choice of a good school, wherever they live, requires a relentless focus on leadership, good teaching, high expectations, and good governance.
This could be enhanced by using the falling school roll nationally to provide smaller class sizes.
That may not be compatible with the idea of rapid expansion but most parents would almost certainly relish more individual attention to their children's needs and indeed many pay for that in the private sector.
How about more investment in a more relevant, flexible and exciting curriculum? With the relentless emphasis on league tables, tests, standards and ‘contestability' we may have lost sight of a vision of education as an exciting rather than merely bureaucratic process.
This overlooks the fact that many parents, while of course wanting their children to be well grounded in literacy and numeracy, also place huge value on music, sport and other activities like drama and art which are often pushed to the sidelines as schools have no option put to pursue their league table positions.
Ranking schools not just by test results, but by the other things they do well. Allied to fairer admissions and a renewed drive on standards, this would enhance choice and enable parents to make more informed decisions before they exercise those ‘preferences'
Fiona Millar is a school governor, education columnist and chair of the National Family and Parenting Institute.
