§ Mr. Ernie Rossasked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will arrange for all application forms from schools participating in the assisted places scheme to be collected by his Department and for such forms to be available to right hon. and hon. Members at their request.
§ Mr. Alexander FletcherNo; the information given in the application form is a matter between the applicant and the participating school.
§ Mr. Ernie Rossasked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will publish in the Official Report the text of the reply from the Under-Secretary of State the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North (Mr. Fletcher) to the hon. Member for Dundee, West dated 23 December 1981 on the assisted places scheme.
§ Mr. Alexander FletcherThe text of the reply is reproduced as follows
58WThank you for your letter of 17 December about the occupations of the parents of children who are receiving fee remission under the assisted places scheme.I enclose, as you request, a copy of the application form and of the notes that accompany it. Application forms are sent out by the schools and retained by them when completed. You ask if schools are allowed to ask additional questions of their own. There is no reason from the Government's point of view why they should not do so; it is of the essence of the scheme that each school is free to operate its normal procedures in recruiting pupils, and we have no desire to intervene.
You will see that in the application form parents are asked to state their profession, business or trade and to give the name, and address of their employers, if any. It would thus be possible for us to ask the schools to let us have a note of the occupations stated, but I see no point in doing so. The information may be of importance to the schools (for example if they feel it appropriate to verify any of the information given by the parents), but it is of no direct interest to the Government. Assistance order the scheme is income-linked, not job-linked. The matter of interest to us is the levels of income of families from which children are taking up assisted places (and as you know the evidence of the first year of the scheme is that there has been a very satisfactory response from families well below average wage levels).Even if we did obtain the information entered on the forms about parental occupations this information would not be translatable into terms of socio-economic groups. The kind of descriptions entered on the application forms will often be in terms that could place the person concerned in one of two or more of the socio-economic groups. For a proper analysis it would be necessary to examine all the descriptions and in many cases to go back to schools and ask them in turn to go back to parents for a fuller explanation of the description. That is not a thing we would contemplate doing without very good reason—you will understand that schools are not rich in clerical or administrative resources and we do not put them to unnecessary trouble—and, as I have explained, we see no good reason at all.
§ Mr. Ernie Rossasked the Secretary of State for Scotland why those who provide false information in applying for an assisted place are subject to the penalty of having their child or children disqualified from the scheme rather than subject to some other penalty; and why he excluded the possibility of prosecution.
§ Mr. Alexander FletcherThe penalty of disqualification is an integral sanction of the scheme. It does not preclude the question of criminal proceedings under other legislation or the common law.