This article was written by Nando Sigona

Leaked cabinet papers seen by the BBC suggest that back when she was home secretary, Theresa May wanted schools to carry out immigration checks and withdraw school places offered to children of parents unlawfully in the UK.

The leaked documents show that the proposals were vehemently opposed by the then-education secretary Nicky Morgan, who wrote to then prime minister, David Cameron, to warn on the “practical and presentational” risks of such measures. Using rather anodyne jargon, Morgan’s letter questioned the “deprioritisation of illegal migrants” proposed by May.

May’s suggestion to “deprioritise” places for these children also implies that they had been in some way prioritised in the school admission system in the first place – which is simply not the case. The law guarantees the right to education for all children of “compulsory school age” irrespective of their lack of immigration status and of the circumstances that led to it. But our research shows that even though these legal provisions exist, access to them has become increasingly difficult for these children.

This is fuelled by contradictory and frequently changing rules and regulations, political announcements and cuts to public spending. Along with broader reforms in the provision of public and children’s services. And research also shows that children’s well-being is bearing the brunt of these aggressive enforcement measures, which are targeted at parents.

In the context of the Conservative Party’s overall immigration goal – to reduce net migration in the UK – excluding children’s access to schooling would actually have little impact on numbers. And our research shows this type of legislation could also end up targeting UK-born children.

Our study estimated that of the 120,000 undocumented migrant children living in the UK, a large majority are either born in the UK or migrated at an early age. UK-born children make up around half of the undocumented child population, and according to existing legislation are entitled to British citizenship after ten years of residence in the country. So legislation such as this would produce a generation of disenfranchised youth – who are non-deportable as they don’t have any connection with other countries and yet excluded from society.

Outposts of border control

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the leaked proposals, the head of Ofsted, Michael Wilshaw, said: “I’m amazed and shocked by it. Schools should not be used for border control.” Yet schools are increasingly being turned into outposts for immigration control and enforcement.

Social workers have a duty to report suspected violations of immigration rules to the Home Office. But fears of being reported to the Home Office makes children and parents wary of interacting with teachers and support workers in the school settings.

A social worker based in a school in West London described the situation as “dehumanising” as it put frontline workers who advise irregular migrants at risk of losing their jobs:

Because of the dehumanising system of the Home Office, people like us, social workers and teachers, are forced to, there is no other word, to treat people like animals really, like we can’t support them. I could lose my job if they find out that I’m supporting a young person.

Immigration watch

But the ideas in this leaked proposal are not particularly new. The recently discussed and then withdrawn proposal for ID checks on school pupils fell into the same category. It is was a model of intervention that has already been piloted in universities where – despite some occasional resistance – checks on visa attendance sheets and immigration inspections have become commonplace.

There is however another aspect of this story that deserves attention: the timing. The leak coincided with the publication of the latest Office of National Statics figures on net migration which showed that, under the watch of May, immigration to the UK hit record levels prior to the Brexit vote in June 2016.

The influx meant net migration remained at a near-record high of 335,000: more than three times the government’s target to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000 a year. The ONS figures are very bad news for May’s government as they question the PM’s ability to deliver on one of the main promises she has made since taking office – curbing immigration.

And not surprisingly, the newly appointed UKIP leader, Paul Nuttal, jumped on the opportunity to say that the figures “just go to show that you can’t trust the Tories to bring down immigration”, blaming the “abject failure” on the prime minister in particular.

The timing of a leak is rarely coincidental. Outrage by the liberal media at the idea of schools turning away undocumented children could actually serve as a badge of honour to the prime minister. It confirms her anti-immigration credentials to her core supporters.

So perhaps for them, another way of reading the BBC story is this: May was a lone voice in the discredited Cameron cabinet who was serious about cutting immigration. But she failed in getting net migration down because of people like Morgan, who, as the readers of the Daily Mail and The Sun would know well, is also a fervent Remainer.

Controlling immigration is a key pillar of May’s government, on which she is under huge pressure to deliver. Targeting children in school, or students at university offers an easy symbolic (and yet ultimately ineffective) point-scoring solutions. So it is likely we will see more of this in the weeks to come.

Nando Sigona, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity, University of Birmingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

This article was written by Sally Power

The Independent Schools Council, a body representing 1,200 private schools, is offering to provide 10,000 annual free places to low-income pupils. As we prepare for an extended debate over the benefits of getting deprived children into private schools, we would do well to look back at the last government-backed attempt to do this: the long-gone Assisted Places Scheme.

The first education policy that Margaret Thatcher announced after she came to power in 1979, the scheme saw more than 75,000 pupils receive publicly-funded and means-tested assistance to attend some of the most selective and prestigious private schools in England and Wales over the course of 17 years.

The scheme was highly controversial, and when New Labour came to power in 1997 it was quickly abolished – and the arguments over its merits are now set to resume. They generally revolve around three main questions: whether it reached the right students, whether those students actually benefited from it, and whether it hurt nearby state-maintained schools.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, these are still complex questions. Here’s a brief outline of some evidence we can use to answer them.

#1: Did the scheme reach the right children?

One of the main criticisms of the scheme was that it didn’t reach the right pupils. While it was often framed as an attempt to “rescue” bright children from working class families and disadvantaged communities, the main criterion for eligibility, other than passing the school’s entrance examination, was financial need.

This meant the policy was significantly “colonised” by parents who might have been suffering short-term financial hardship (often because of divorce), but who were in many ways quite culturally and economically advantaged.

An early study of the scheme in 1989 found that fewer than 10% of those with an assisted place had fathers in manual jobs, whereas 50% had fathers in middle-class jobs. Almost all the employed mothers of assisted place pupils were also in middle-class jobs.

In general, it became clear that the majority of children who received assistance came from families with relatively strong educational inheritances, meaning the gap between what they’d have achieved without assisted places and what they managed with them was probably not as wide as imagined.

#2: Did pupils who received assisted places actually benefit?

There’s no straightforward answer to this one, but there’s little doubt that many individuals did benefit measurably from the scheme.

My colleagues and I have tracked the careers of a cohort of assisted place-holders over the last 30 years, and have found that for many of them, the scheme provided access to learning opportunities and experiences that they might not otherwise have had. In terms of qualifications, simple comparison of GCSE and A-level results revealed that our assisted place holders did better than our state-educated respondents, and better than might have been predicted on the basis of background socio-economic and educational inheritance variables.

But the academic achievement of those who held assisted places varies widely. The place-holders who saw the highest gains in qualifications were from middle-class backgrounds. The advantages for those from working-class backgrounds were less clear cut, and overall these pupils did worse than might be expected. This is largely because these pupils were disproportionately likely to have dropped out school before they were 18.

It seems these students found it difficult to thrive in the more socially exclusive environments of elite private schools. And while the degree results of assisted place-holders compare favourably with their state-educated counterparts, they were less likely to have completed their studies. Nearly one in ten dropped out of or failed their university courses.

In general, we concluded that if children from disadvantaged backgrounds stayed on at school and at university, they did well. However, the odds of these students “dropping out” were high.

#3: How did it affect neighbouring schools?

This is perhaps the most difficult question of all to answer. There is already considerable social segregation between many state-maintained schools, and it’s impossible to know what choices parents might have made had the Assisted Places Scheme not been available.

It might be argued that the impact was minimal, especially if the scheme benefited those who might have sent their children to private school anyway (as was often suggested – see question #1). The number of assisted places certainly wasn’t large enough to have any significant system-wide effect on admissions statistics. But the scheme’s ideological impact was perhaps more significant than the numbers of pupils involved. Simply by virtue of being in place, it sent a clear message that state-maintained non-selective schools are unable to meet the needs of the academically able.

Overall, then, the scheme’s history is a chequered one. Although individual schools and students did benefit, there’s plenty of evidence that this 30-year-long experiment was hardly an unqualified triumph. If the Independent Schools Council’s latest proposal is taken up and the government commits to once again helping poor and deprived pupils into private schools, the Assisted Places Scheme provides clear benchmarks for success.

Any new scheme must serve the people it’s actually meant to serve, and any schools that participate need to find ways of making students from disadvantaged backgrounds feel like they belong. And more than that, any such scheme has to be careful what message it’s sending about the state sector, where the overwhelming majority of eligible children will still spend their school years.

Sally Power, Director of WISERD Education, WISERD, Cardiff University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.