What leads a school to bend the admissions rules?
The allegation that some schools are not obeying the admissions rules leads to the question: how did this happen?
It seems to me there are three possible reasons as to how such a situation could have arisen.
First, it is possible that someone at the very top of the school deliberately took the decision to bend the rules, perhaps on the basis that “they don’t apply to us” or perhaps because there was the belief that everyone else was doing it, or simply that no one would notice.
But there is also the possibilty that the breaking of the rules happened by accident - perhaps because everyone thought that someone else was checking what the rules actually said. Or maybe because the person delegated with the task of being the compliance officer didn’t get a good enough briefing, and worked on a set of assumptions.
Finally there is the possibility that someone lower down the school just went off on his/her own, changing a note to parents without even thinking that there might be a government rule stating that this should not be done.
My interest for many years has been in the way in which organisations of all types work - and the way in which they ensure that overall they comply with the regulations (from admissions to VAT). The problem that we have seen with the regulations over admission can equally be replicated with a failure to obey health and safety regulations, environmental regulations, and a dozen other regulations that the school is subject to.
The best solution that I see is one in which those who work in the school’s administration become involved in compliance. Of course this can raise the administrators’ status quite considerably, taking them away from simply sorting out specific issues, to having a wider perspective - and that can be quite a cultural shock for those who are used to seeing admin staff as being merely there to check the registers, collect the dinner money, and welcome visitors.
But if the compliance tasks are not given to administrators, they are given to teachers - and that means that people who are already overloaded become even more overloaded. And in those circumstnaces compliance simply doesn’t work not least because the act of preparing and teaching lessons is so different from the act of being a compliance officer.
My interest in this topic has led to an invovlement in the School of Educational Administration, which runs courses that are designed to explore the ways in which administrators can make a greater contribution to the overall work of the school - and if you have any interest in the way your school ensures that it is compliant with the regulations, you might like to consider how the SEA works with administrators.
The next course they are running is the “Work Management and
Administration Course” - a two month programme that has an intake which closes on 31 March. The one year distance learning “Certificate in Educational Admininsration” course closes its next intake on May 6.
There are details of the courses on www.admin.org.uk and a prospectus can be obtrained by emailing prospectus@admin.org.uk
Tony Attwood