Sunday 11 March 2007

The concept of a 'Catchment Area'

According to Wikipedia, a catchment area is:

"In human geography: a catchment area is the area and population from which a city or individual service attracts visitors or customers. For example, a school catchment area is the geographic area from which students are eligible to attend a local school."

This is something that people have known for several years in Britain. It's a simple form of management. Without it, you risk too many people wanting to go to the same school and there being a strain placed on resources. You also get lack of funding and unemployment in those institutions that are less popular.

If population density changes, all you have to do is change the catchment areas. Then you avoid too many people going to the same place and (like the previous scenario) putting a strain on resources.

Now for the 'new' system - a lottery. The first place to do it is Brighton. According to BBC News:

"The main factor will be postcode-based catchment areas, but where schools are over-subscribed a lottery will be used.

Elsewhere, some individual schools have allocated a number of places this way, acting independently of their councils."

The first part of that will make you think that not much has changed. However, the second part is the most controversial. It could potentially mean that the distance been home and school is several miles. It'll be riskier for some children if they're walking by themselves and if the parents drive their children to school, transportation costs go up and there would be problems if the parents have to go straight to work afterwards.

"But other parents believe the new system will prove fairer and will stop popular schools becoming the preserve of a privileged minority who can afford to buy houses nearby."

This is an interesting point - also from the BBC News article mentioned earlier, mainly because it has some logic despite being wrong. The lottery aspect will make things closer to random, but the postcode part still means the privileged could make their way into certain schools. The under-privileged could then still be forced into going to the schools that are further away.

There is only one good way of stopping all the so-called 'privileged' families going to one school - make all schools the same high standard. The lottery concept would then be pointless and you could use the catchment area system to manage the numbers going to each school.

You should not need to create a shortlist of schools. If investment at this level of education was good enough and appropriately distributed, the local school should be the best one for you.

So, what do you think?

Technorati tags: School, Catchment Area, Lottery

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