A primary school has won a battle to keep four forms of entry after councillors voted to reduce its annual intake to three forms.
Brunswick Primary, in Hove, is the fourth local school to win an appeal to schools adjudicator Deborah Pritchard against the decision by Brighton and Hove City Council.
The council is trying to the reduce the hundreds of spare school places to reflect more closely the falling number of four-year-olds in the area.
Officials have forecast 744 spare places in reception by 2024. And by September 2025 the council expects parents to apply for places for just 1,930 children – down 20 per cent from this year.
The council’s Children, Young People and Skills Committee voted last January to reduce Brunswick’s PAN (published admission number) from 120 – or four forms – to 90 from September next year.
But the school appealed, with governors saying that a smaller intake would leave families without their first choice of school.
The schools adjudicator said: “While the governing board agreed with the local authority’s forecast that there would be a substantial reduction in the number of children across the city requiring a place in YR (reception), it also argued that demand for places at the school had been sustained at a level consistent with a PAN of 120.
“The governing board, therefore, believed that if the PAN were to be 90, then around 15 to 30 families a year would not receive their first choice of school.”
The school’s governing body said that displacing the 15 to 30 children to other schools would have a knock-on effect on other children at schools in their community.
In her analysis, the schools’ adjudicator found that among the schools within two miles of Brunswick Primary, there were 106 vacant places.
This was an 8 per cent vacancy rate, compared with the council’s 5 per cent to 10 per cent target.
When the adjudicator looked at the nine schools within the same “planning area” as Brunswick, they found just 33 vacancies this year – fewer than 5 per cent.
She said that the council’s approach focused on year groups of at least 30 children for schools to be viable without providing evidence that this was necessary.
The adjudicator added: “Reducing the PAN to 90 is likely to frustrate parental preference significantly as over 90 parents have put the school as their first preference in previous years and signifi
cantly more than 90 children have been admitted and so the school has the highest preference that could be achieved for them.
It’s interesting how different the story becomes when you get all the information