We have only just seen the Council’s papers on school admission arrangements, but our immediate reaction is that we are disappointed but not surprised to see that the Council is pushing ahead with a damaging set of proposals and that the Council has chosen to ignore the views of schools and parents.
The Council has ignored the opinion of all the LA-maintained secondary schools who unanimously opposed the introduction of an open admission priority. We are amazed that the Council has not considered it necessary to work closely with secondary schools to develop proposals that would benefit the city’s schools and its children. The data the Council has provided from the consultation indicates that there was also widespread opposition from parents to the introduction of an open admission priority. Simply reducing the percentage does not address the problems with the proposed open admission priority that have been highlighted throughout the consultation process.
The combined effect of the Council’s contradictory proposals will be to create an artificially oversubscribed catchment area for Dorothy Stringer/Varndean by simultaneously increasing the number of children and reducing the number of places. The Council’s own numbers indicate that the proposals would leave 63 children with no priority anywhere (54 from the Dorothy Stringer/Varndean catchment area and 9 from the Patcham catchment area). Many of these children would have to make long, complex and isolated journeys to school. The reduction in the percentage of places reserved for the open admission priority reduces the number of children who would be displaced, but it does not alter the negative effects that those children would experience.
The Council papers identify the level of concern that was raised about the way the consultation process was conducted and a failure to comply with the requirements of the School Admissions Code. The Council ran a divisive and confusing consultation. It started with only the Cabinet documents and then put out new information during the consultation. Its consultation documents contained major errors and misleading explanations of the Council’s proposals.
We urge Councillors to provide genuine democratic scrutiny when these proposals come to Council. We would ask every Councillor to consider whether they are comfortable with the fact that children who are displaced from their catchment area will get a lower priority than any other children. We would also ask every Councillor to consider the length and complexity of journey that displaced children could have to make, in isolation and separated from their friendship groups.