The Department for Education’s press office is coming in for heavy criticism over tweets that experienced observers have described as misleading the public in a bid to promote grammar schools.
Two weeks ago, the department tweeted: “70% of white working class boys from grammars go to uni vs 54% from comprehensives. What do you think about grammars[?]”. But the UK Statistics Authority [pdf] said the tweet was “not a fair representation of the underlying statistics” and that grammars’ ability to select pupils meant the statistics were not based on a like-for-like comparison with comprehensives.
Now a leading Conservative peer, Lord Lucas, has joined a former chief economist at the Cabinet Office, Jonathan Portes, in condemning a second tweet, published last Wednesday. This said: “Selective schools are almost 50% more popular than non-selective schools when comparing a parent’s first preference for their child.”
@educationgovuk I am still making up my mind, but I do now what I think of your tweet: untruthful, misleading and a stain on your reputation
— Ralph Lucas (@LordLucasCD) November 16, 2016
Lucas tweeted that the 50% statistic was “untruthful, misleading and a stain on [the DfE’s] reputation”. He explains that if grammar schools were introduced in a community, then parents were likely to opt for them over secondary moderns. But this did not mean parents wanted selection if given a choice.
He says: “I do not think the DfE should be putting out stuff which is so wrong it’s not even arguable. The DfE has some good statisticians who know what these figures mean, but some low life on the PR side seems to think they can completely misinterpret data.”
Portes says: “They seem to go from bad to worse. This is flagrantly against the spirit and quite possibly the letter of the civil service code [of practice] and the department should get a grip.”
The development comes during a DfE “consultation” on expanding selection that does not actually ask the public whether or not it should happen.
A DfE spokesperson says the second tweet accurately reflects underlying statistics, with a link to a document [pdf] where users could “find out more detail on how the data was collected and the relevant caveats”.
Little faith in Catholic admissions criteria
Meanwhile, has the Catholic Education Service been misleading the public in its support of controversial government plans to allow more faith-based selection in free schools?
The government is planning to lift the stipulation that no free school can select more than half its pupils by religious faith, a rule designed to promote diversity. The Catholic church has not so far set up any free schools as it wants the freedom to select all pupils by faith, as is possible in existing Catholic state-funded schools, arguing that the 50% cap would mean “discriminating” against some pupils on the basis of their Catholicism and “could cause schools to turn Catholic families away on the grounds that they are Catholics”.
However, the British Humanist Association says that, where a school makes 50% of its places available to any child, regardless of their faith, it would not then be discriminating against any of these children on religious grounds but treating all prospective pupils, including Catholics, on a level admissions playing field.
A spokesman for the CES commented: “We want diverse schools with pupils of all religions and none, but to do this we need the places. The cap [on selection] was holding us back. Existing Catholic schools, which can select all places on the grounds of faith, contain a third of pupils who are not Catholic. They are also the most ethnically diverse.”
But if the CES is so positive about non-Catholics in its intake, we remain puzzled why it needs the ability to select all pupils by faith.
