The Ganguly Committee recommendations on nursery admissions were always going to be manipulated by some schools who do not want to be equitable, fair and transparent with their admissions policy. Many of these schools exist to give advantage to the children of certain sections of society, and discriminated on the grounds of wealth, attitudes, family background and social status.

 

The Ganguly committee’s recommendations, that were surprisingly accepted by the court, blatantly discriminate against all children who’s parents have not had the good fortune to receive advanced (university) education. They also discriminated against the boy child.  Not only that! The court also left the door open for further discrimination by the schools by giving them discretionary marks to award to children.

 

Under the school’s discretionary category several schools are ensuring that their client group remains more or less the same by awarding their points to alumna.  This is a particularly useful exclusion tool if the school has been long established. By the time siblings, staff children, and the children of alumna have been given their discretionary points the school is full. 

 

Those schools that have come up in the last 15 to 20 years are without a significant number of alumni with children of school going age. They cannot pursue the ‘exclude all but the alumni option’, and they are desperately seeking other solutions.

 

Some are pursuing admission policies using the ‘management quota’ ploy. In effect these schools have given their discretionary points to anyone the School owners, and Principal want in the school. Those who have adopted this strategy are playing for time. They know that the court will find this unacceptable but they hope that by the time that happens, the academic year will be well under way. They also hope that the court will only insist on a change for the next academic year and not to undo this year’s policy.

 

Some schools are discriminating against whole neighbourhoods. Some neighbourhoods that are within three kilometres of certain schools have been excluded from the school’s consideration - presumably because these were not of the social class that the school wished to take their students.

 

Many schools are getting increasingly desperate and there is a growing number of schools who if they are not allowed to discriminate are planning to do away with nursery admissions and admit directly into class one. There the court rules do not apply and so there is no onus on the school being open, fair and transparent and they can continue their admission procedures of previous years.

 

Meanwhile, as predicted in this column, the discrimination against the boy child is also causing problems. In schools that have applied the rules properly girl admissions outnumber boys 3 to 1, with over 75% of the new intake being girls! The question that still needs to be answered is,  ‘Did the committee mean this to be the case or was their knowledge of math too weak to understand this outcome?’   

 

Our education system was not/is not designed to offer equal opportunities, and snobbery, and all manner of discrimination is not likely to be eradicated from our schools without the viable and enforced Equal Opportunity Laws that are common in the rest of the world. In the meantime we have 20+ applicants for every desirable private school place, so even if these schools embraced equality of opportunities, there would still be a huge number of parents unhappy with the outcome. Whatever…. It’s bound to end in tears.