The Child Minder

The children's secretary, it turns out, is aptly named. His range of measures designed to tackle bad behaviour in schools are a load of balls. Hefty fines - as much as £1,000 - will be imposed on parents who fail to keep their children at home, and "off the streets", while they are excluded. Fines, fines and more fines. A D- for imagination, Ed Balls. You must try harder. There is no evidence that punishing people by hitting them in the pocket is effective.

What is it about any positive story about academies that makes me immediately doubt the validity of whatever is being claimed? I guess it probably has something to do with the fact that, more often than not, my doubts are well-founded. And last week was no exception.

Ed Balls has announced a £396 million extension to the Children's Fund for the next three years. It will be sweet music to all children's workers previously concerned about the existing Fund's end in 2008. Brownie points (no pun intended) for Balls then.

Last week's Institute for Public Policy Research report on school admissions articulated what many had long suspected: that many schools which control their own admissions are using this power to select in more affluent, high-performing pupils and keep out those from less advantaged backgrounds.
The result: socially segregated schools and increasing educational inequality, due in part to things called "peer group effects" - the phenomenon by which pupils do better when they have a concentration of high-performing peers in their class.

When the story of Ruth Kelly sending her son to private school first broke, I initially had some sympathy for her predicament. She was, as oposition leader David Cameron put it, a parent first and a politician (and ex education secretary) second, and was making a choice in the best interests of her son, who has learning difficulties.

But all traces of that initial sympathy evaporated at the weekend while reading a story in the Sunday Times. The paper reminded me that, while in charge at the Department for Education, Kelly presided over the closure of special schools up and down the country resulting in the loss of thousands of school places for children with special needs.

Kelly, who is now communities secretary, defended her decision to shell out £15,000 a year for private education on the grounds that her local council could not provide for her son's particular needs. But what about all the other parents out there whose local authorities cannot meet their children's needs - perhaps because of a local school's closure agreed to by a former education secretary?

Until everyone can afford the option of meeting their children's needs by going private, closures in the name of inclusion must end. Some children with special needs may undeniably flourish in a mainstream school setting, but others will not. And the state education system must continue to reflect that.

It must be hoped that the new school admissions code published this week will go some way towards closing the well-documented (and shocking) educational achievement gap between children in care and other pupils.

It is just a shame that we cannot welcome the code wholeheartedly, knowing that it also sanctions discrimination by academies against children with behavioural difficulties.

A cynic might suggest that allowing academies with spare places to refuse admission to children with 'challenging behaviour' in their first two years is nothing more than a blatant attempt to boost results at these controversial schools at a time when the government is trying to justify its unreserved support for them, despite widespread concerns across the sector...