Imagine this: every child goes to their local school. No application forms. No anxiety-riddled spreadsheets. No praying for a postcode. No gaming the system.
Just the school up the road, with the kids from around the corner.
It sounds radical, but it might be the most ordinary idea in the world.
School admissions
What if we simply accepted - even embraced - the idea that schools are community institutions, not consumer products? What if parent choice was removed altogether?
Provocative? Yes - deliberately so. But let’s just sit with it for a moment. What would it mean for our children?
It would mean that kids from all backgrounds - from the social housing estate and the five-bed detached - would grow up learning side by side.
Children with special educational needs and disabilities would be educated not in isolation but in their neighbourhoods, with friends who walk the same streets and shop at the same corner shop.
It would mean relationships that cross divides: bonds forged in classrooms, playgrounds and lunch queues that could last a lifetime.
Selective education
It’s hard to overstate how socially transformative that could be.
We talk a lot about belonging, cohesion and community, yet our school system is riddled with filters - by postcode, by performance, by faith, by selection. We’ve built a model that permits, and at times encourages, subtle segregation.
Selective education either by testing or by postcode would become a historical curio. Why would you tutor children or pay a school premium when every child goes local?
Schools could stop worrying about marketing and branding, and focus on the main thing.
Just schools doing what they were built to do: teach, nurture, include.
More from our thought experiment series:
Our Byzantine admissions bureaucracy would all but disappear. No more complex preference systems or allocation algorithms. The vast machinery that sits behind school admissions, often invisible to families, could be stripped back.
The financial savings - which would be immense - would support better provision for those very few children with complex needs who attend special provision.
Primary to secondary transitions would feel smoother and more human. Instead of dealing with 30 different feeder primaries, a secondary might deal with three or four.
Deep relationships could form between staff across phases. Local families would get to know the school before their child ever walks through the gates.
Eco benefits
Then there’s transport. If children could walk, scoot or cycle to school, the environmental and financial impact would be profound. Less congestion, less public money spent on buses and taxis, fewer barriers for those on low incomes. It’s a localised, low-carbon dream.
Let’s be honest: the rhetoric of “parental choice” has always been a little dishonest. It has always been a chimera for some families, especially the poorest who struggle with transport, the cost of uniforms and form filling.
The sharp-elbowed, the affluent and the aspirational have sought in a very English way to inch away from those who are different. This othering is then reflected in the school system, with some schools seeking to attract those parents and children who best fit the school’s brand.
In reality, choice becomes a euphemism for separation; a system of quiet exclusion dressed up as empowerment.
Playing the system?
Some schools, too, have leaned into this, branding themselves as “right for the right kind of family.” They offer polished performances of excellence, quietly signalling who they want and who they don’t.
So, what would it take to stop this competition? To reject the market logic and return to a community model?
To say that every school has a duty to serve all of the children who live nearby - no curation, no skimming, no filtering.
Of course, such a system would need high standards, strong leadership, fair funding and serious support. But the rewards could be vast: stronger communities, better inclusion, a fairer system and the end of the arms race that leaves so many children behind.
Without parent choice we can all just focus on serving the community that our schools are in and stop the competition that just fails the forgotten third.
We’re long overdue a rethink. And maybe, just maybe, the simplest idea is the most powerful one of all.
Seamus Murphy is CEO of Turner Schools
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