Tax break incentive for parents

Parents should be offered council tax breaks to send their children to less popular state schools in an attempt to head off a crisis in competition for places, according to evidence submitted to a Commons inquiry.

The measure would help combat 'selection by mortgage' - where house prices shoot up in the catchment areas of favoured state schools, pricing all but the richest families out - as the battle to squeeze children into successful schools gets tougher.

One estate in St Albans next to a popular state girls' school has virtually become an all-female ghetto as parents snap up the houses. The Commons Education and Skills Select Committee heard that out of 50 children living there, only one is a boy. And a recent survey showed that being in the 'right' catchment area could add up to £30,000 to the value of a house in Reading or up to £20,000 in Coventry.

Memos submitted to the committee by academics Professor John Fitz, Chris Taylor and Stephen Gorard from Cardiff University school of Social Sciences warn that because house prices rise fast in catchment areas for good schools, richer children are more likely to get into thriving schools, and poorer children to get trapped in struggling ones.

The team recently presented its ideas to a conference on social mobility organised by Matthew Taylor - the think-tank chief now in charge of drawing up Labour's next manifesto - and attended by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

Fitz told the committee that it would be 'politically sensitive' to try to wean middle-class parents off their favoured schools but that there were several options, including the reintroduction of banding - where children are tested at 11 and all schools forced to take an equal mix of high-scoring, middle-scoring and low-scoring pupils - or tax breaks. 'You could reduce council tax for people willing to move out of their catchment area into another area,' he added. 'This is just an out-of-the-box idea but you could do that.'

The written paper submitted by the team to the committee, which is investigating secondary education, found the problem was largely confined to London and the South East, with the worst battlefields in the London boroughs of Enfield - Schools Minister Stephen Twigg's constituency - and Westminster. Both boast highly rated state schools attractive to middle class parents.

The Tories will unveil proposals at their party conference next month to ease the competition for places, reflecting growing unrest among parents. They are likely to include allowing popular schools to expand and unpopular ones to close, an idea also suggested by the Cardiff team.

Professor John Coldron, professor of education at Sheffield Hallam University, told the committee the situation in some areas was becoming 'catastrophic in terms of the anxiety that is being caused for children, parents and teachers'.

His written evidence to the committee cited a number of dubious practices by some schools to skew their intake towards children likely to do well. One London school admitted gearing its admissions to avoid pupils excluded from other schools and refugee children. Coldron also warned that the Government's code of practice - supposed to ensure fair admissions - is widely flouted. While heads should give priority to children in care, for example, only 2 per cent of schools in Coldron's research did so.

All three experts said abolishing selection would ease the problem.