Brighton and Hove Council has become the first education authority in Britain to allocate secondary school places by lottery. Nothing could better demonstrate the failure of British social policy since 1945.
Probably the most popular state secondary school in Brighton is the one in the pictures - Cardinal Newman, a Catholic establishment. It is odd how so many people who are vehemently anti-religious are happy to send their children to church schools when they recognise that church schools tend to provide a higher standard of education. A friend of mine sent his daughter there and was livid when she decided to become a Catholic - he would have been less put out if she had been in trouble with the police, got pregnant or become a drug addict. What did he expect?
How things have changed - at one time Catholic schools were notorious for having the roughest pupils and severe discipline. Newman is over-subscribed with Catholics and Anglicans, so if you aren't eligible and can't afford to go private, the fate of your children will depend on the Council's lottery.
The background to this needs to be spelled out. Troublesome children tend to come from deprived families. Usually this means poor families and these tend to have concentrated in particular parts of the city, mostly the large housing estates on the edge of town. So the schools that include these estates in their catchment areas have more than their fair share of troublesome children, whose presence disrupts entire classes. Not only do they make it difficult for anyone to learn anything - they also drive away many of the best teachers, and the entire setup discourages potentially good teachers from entering the profession at all.
Parents who are concerned about their children's education want to avoid living in the catchment area of schools whose intake includes children from the council estates. It isn't snobbery - they only want to make sure that their children do not waste their time at school and keep away from bad company. The effect of this is to drive up house prices - really, land values - in the areas away from the council estates, within the catchment areas of what have become the better schools.
The council's lottery policy will ensure that every school in the city will have its quota of disruptive children and that everyone who goes to school in the state sector will have to put up with such children in their classroom and have their education damaged in consequence.
The real question that has to be asked, though, is why, more than sixty years after World War 2, we have spawned a permanent and growing underclass, whose children so many of the rest of us are desperate to keep our own well away from? This is the extent of the failure of British social policy.
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