Our response to Brighton & Hove City Council’s secondary school admission proposals
Jan 27, 2025
01
Who we are.
Equity in Education has been formed by parents and carers living in north-east Brighton (in the BACA school catchment area) to campaign for educational equity in Brighton & Hove. We want to see changes to the current secondary school admissions system. We have a website at https://educationequity.co.uk.
Currently, some families in the city live in two-school catchment areas and have a genuine choice over where they send their children to school. Families who live in single-school catchment areas find it much more difficult to make meaningful choices because, whatever preferences they may have, only a tiny number of our children get offered a place at an out-of-catchment school. We think that this is unfair and that it is having a detrimental impact on our children and our communities and we are campaigning for change.
This response is informed by the input of many dozens of conversations with and amongst parents, carers and residents in Moulsecoomb, Bevendean, Coombe Road, Saunders Park and Bates Estate. Most importantly, it is based on many interesting discussions with our children and young people.
02
Improving the education offer for disadvantaged pupils.
We strongly support the proposal to amend the admissions priority 4 that applies to children eligible for FSM, to lift the limit of places allocated under this criterion to 30%. Its immediate effect would be to simplify the Council’s recently-introduced admissions priority 5 and to allow some disadvantaged pupils to express preferences for popular schools in the city.
Our experience so far, however, has been that only very few families living in the BACA catchment know of the out-of-catchment FSM priority. There is also an expectation that only very few school places would become available to them in nearby schools.
03
More choice for families living in single-school catchment areas.
We strongly support the introduction of an open admission priority. Families in the north-east of Brighton consistently mention a lack of school choice as a barrier to success for disadvantaged children. There is a strong sense of unfairness that some catchment areas include two schools whilst others include only one. Many families in the area would welcome a greater likelihood of securing an alternative to their catchment area school.
We believe that it is essential that the percentage of open admissions places for each school be set at a minimum of 20%. This is necessary to make school choice meaningful for those living in single-school catchment areas. Crucially, setting open admissions at a minimum of 20% will also increase the likelihood that children moving into and out of catchment areas will do so with groups of children they know.
To make the open admissions priority meaningful, Equity in Education urges the Council to maintain the current sibling link priority for all children in the city. The current proposals remove the sibling link priority for children attending out-of-catchment schools. We think that this is unfair and that it will act as a barrier to families in areas like ours to taking advantage of the FSM and open admissions priorities. It is, therefore, likely to undermine the otherwise progressive direction of the proposals.
We support the proposal to increase the number of preferences parents and carers can put down on their application form from 3 to, at least, 4 schools.
04
More mixed schools create better outcomes and experiences for all.
Just as important is the possibility that, as an effect of the open admissions priority, pupils living in the catchment areas for Patcham High and Varndean/DS would secure a school place at BACA, with a likelihood of this creating a more mixed pupil intake.
Many families in north-east Brighton talk about BACA as a good and improving school, which supports students in their ambitions. However, BACA’s catchment area includes areas ranked amongst the most deprived in England and the school’s FSM pupil intake is the highest amongst secondary schools in Brighton & Hove. Although BACA sets its own admissions criteria, we strongly support the Council’s commitment to keeping all secondary schools open and urge it to directly address the high levels of disadvantage in its final proposals.
An unintended outcome of the proposed admission changes could be that an increased choice of schools for in-catchment pupils would reduce the number of pupils attending BACA in the future. We urge the council to closely monitor the numbers of students at BACA to ensure that the policies do not have the unintended consequence of making the school less sustainable. If it does look like numbers are falling as a result of the policies being introduced, we call upon the Council to react swiftly and place catchment area changes back on the table as a means of ensuring that BACA isn’t negatively affected by declining student numbers.
05
The issue of falling pupil numbers.
Equity in Education supports the proposed PAN reductions for some schools in response to declining numbers of children in the city and budgetary pressures. Doing nothing would cause real risks to the future of other schools.
In our area, we see many families leave the city, or move within the city, as their children approach the final years of primary school. In the medium term, we hope that fairer arrangements for secondary school admissions will make Moulsecoomb, Bevendean and Coombe Road a desirable place to live for parents and carers of older children. This could have a positive effect on declining pupil numbers in Brighton & Hove and on the sustainability of our communities and the city as a whole.
06
Special educational needs and other barriers.
It is crucial that children who require additional educational, physical and emotional support are prioritised in the secondary school admissions system so that they are able to access a school that meets their needs, whether or not they have an ECHP.
The process to have a child’s additional needs recognised under priority 2 of the admission arrangements remains complex to navigate. In areas of high disadvantage, families often lack the resources to get a timely diagnosis for health conditions or other compelling evidence. For example, there is now only one GP surgery in the Moulsecoomb & Bevendean ward. The proposed new admissions priority would give families in north-east Brighton, including those whose children have special educational needs, a chance to state a meaningful preference for a school that is best suited to their children, particularly if they live closer to an out-of-catchment school than to BACA.
As they take this process forward, we urge the Council to take onboard the concerns of SEND families, both of those who may miss out on their preferred in-catchment school and of those whose children’s needs are better met in an out-of-catchment school. We likewise call for more attention to be paid to the needs of children facing other exceptional barriers to education, such as young carers, children from vulnerable migrant families or those living in statutorily overcrowded housing.
07
Catchment area changes require transport solutions.
We agree with the proposed changes to the catchment area boundary between Whitehawk and Kemptown. This addresses longstanding injustices in the current system and finally gives families from Whitehawk the option to express meaningful school preferences.
An urgent review of home to school transport will be necessary if the proposed changes to catchment areas and admissions priorities go ahead. School buses and other forms of public transport need to be safe, reliable and affordable and timetables need to be drawn to allow children to attend after-school activities.
08
A missed opportunity.
While we support the proposed changes as a step in the right direction. We believe that the proposals put forward by the council represent a missed opportunity. There are historical reasons why the catchment areas in the city exist as they do. One of them is that the communities who live in the BACA catchment area often lack a voice. From our experience, very few people from this area knew about the Council’s engagement exercise and even fewer contributed to it. We think, therefore, that the decision to discount a shake-up of catchment area boundaries was premature and taken without really listening to the voices of this part of the city.
The concentration of deprivation in this area is higher than in other areas of the city, with over half of children at BACA eligible for FSM. The current catchment area boundaries intensify this segregation. One of the things we have heard repeatedly from families here is a desire for a fairer system of catchment areas.
As a newly formed group of (mostly) parents of children at primary school, we have done our best to collect opinions of local people in a very short space of time. But we still believe that input into the consultation from this part of the city is underrepresented - not because residents don’t care, but because they feel disenfranchised and excluded. We urge the Council to do more in the future to engage with marginalised communities and ensure that their interests are represented.