Schools Adjudicator warns of growing input of lawyers in admissions disputes

There is a noticeable trend of lawyers being brought in to help parents get their children into their preferred state school, England's Schools Adjudicator has told MPs.

Dr Ian Craig was appearing before the Commons Education Committee today (2 March). According to the BBC, he said: “More and more lawyers know we’re there.”

The Adjudicator told the committee he also had concerns about aptitude tests used by schools. "For example, in musical ability, how do you test for aptitude while trying to screen out any prior learning a child has had?,” he asked, adding that “it is very, very difficult to differentiate between aptitude and ability."

According to the BBC report, Dr Craig said he had looked up aptitude in the dictionary and found it gave ability as a definition. "If the Oxford dictionary can't distinguish between aptitude and ability, I find it very difficult for us to do that,” he said.

The Adjudicator said he stood by his concerns about church schools’ admissions codes, which he expressed in his annual report in November 2010. Dr Craig had been quoted as saying the complexity of some of the points systems adopted favoured middle class families.

He told the committee: "Some faith schools do have, we have evidence, inappropriate points systems in place that are not necessarily objective and they could relate to some sections of the community over others.”

MPs on the committee however suggested that Dr Craig had overstated the issue, with Damian Hinds arguing that it was not a problem “in the vast, vast majority of schools".