Poverty News Blog

from The Telegraph

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 2:54am GMT 27/11/2007

Good schools should consider limiting places for middle-class pupils to admit more children from poor homes, according to the equality watchdog.

The "radical idea" of introducing quotas could be one way of tackling class barriers in society, said Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

In a speech, he said spreading the poorest pupils more evenly across schools had produced "exceptional" results in economically segregated areas of the United States.

Mr Phillips, who has previously suggested that schools dominated by one racial group should mix pupils, insisted a similar programme in this country would tackle social segregation.

It comes as the Government attempts to break the middle-class monopoly on the best comprehensives in England by allowing them to admit pupils using lotteries.

Speaking at a conference on community cohesion in London, Mr Phillips said it was crucial to think of integration in terms of social class, not merely colour. "We will never be a society confident with our own diversity as long as some are disproportionately disadvantaged," he said.

"Diversity coupled with unity enriches our society, but difference allowed to fuel inequality is capable of destroying it. And socio-economic division - or as we used to call it, class - still throws up the greatest inequalities.

"Addressing class difference is critical to our ambition to challenge the iron law that an infant's start in life would be conditioned by who his or her parents were, and here we could get really radical."

Mr Phillips gave the example of the decision in 2000 by the local education authority in Wake County, North Carolina, to abandon its policy of trying to mix pupils by race. Instead, it "opted to mix them by economic background", using eligibility for free school meals as a proxy for poverty. Some 40 districts across the US have since followed suit.

Mr Phillips said: "The goal is to ensure that no school has more than a certain percentage on free school meals, or more than a quarter under-performing on regular tests. The balancing of numbers is achieved by moving a whole unit of children rather than an individual.

"In Wake County something exceptional has happened. Despite a 45 per cent non-white mix, the schools are performing so well that white families are now returning from the suburbs."

Research has shown that just three per cent of pupils in the best state schools are entitled to free meals compared with 17 per cent nationally.

A new admissions code - governing entry to schools from September 2008 - says lotteries "can widen access to schools for those unable to afford to buy houses near to favoured schools and create greater social equity".

Under new laws, schools also have a duty to promote community cohesion.

From next September, Ofsted, the education watchdog, will judge schools on how successfully they are promoting race relations.