Parents are fed up with frequent changes to school admissions rules, want more time for them to bed in before further changes – and asked for clearer evidence to justify the council’s proposals.
They were responding to the latest revisions put forward by Brighton and Hove City Council which is under a legal duty to consult whenever it plans to amend the criteria.
Consultation fatigue could also have set in, with only 38 people in total going along to five public meetings.
Just two people turned up to one of the meetings, about a proposal to reduce the intake at Downs Junior School, in Ditchling Road, Brighton.
And no one at all turned up for a meeting about a similar proposal at Rudyard Kipling Primary School, in Chalkland Rise, Woodingdean.
A report to the full council said: “General comments on the consultation proposals highlighted dissatisfaction with the ongoing and frequent changes to school admission arrangements and a lack of clear data and impact modelling to justify the proposals.
“There was also a call for the council to pause any further changes and allow time to assess the impact of changes made for 2025 and 2026 before introducing further changes.”
The main proposals would cut the intake – or published admission number (PAN) – at Downs Junior School from 128 to 96 and at Rudyard Kipling from 45 to 30 for children starting in September 2027.
The other main change would affect secondary schools, extending the sibling link priority to schools outside a child’s catchment area.
The proposals are due to be decided at a meeting of the full council at Hove Town Hall next Thursday (29 January).
The most recent changes to have taken effect allocated out-of-area secondary school places for 5 per cent of the children in catchments areas with just one school. Children eligible for free school meals were also given greater priority.
This improved the chances of poorer children from places such as Portslade and East Brighton gaining a place at the three most popular schools, Dorothy Stringer, Varndean and Blatchington Mill.
The change affected pupils applying to start secondary school in September this year – as did a change to the catchment areas for Longhill in the east and Stringer and Varndean.
Many more parents took part in the consultations that started a year earlier, in the autumn of 2024, with sharp divisions and strongly held views for and against the changes.
The effects of those changes are not yet public. Those applying for a Year 7 place in September should learn the outcome on national offer day for secondary schools, Monday 2 March.
The report to the full council said that 32 children in the Patcham High School catchment and 20 in the Dorothy Stringer and Varndean catchment might not be offered a place at their local school on national offer day.
The council said that places often became available after the initial allocation but before the school year had started.
It also said that the schools adjudicator had said that there was no requirement for a catchment to take every pupil living in the area.
One other proposed change would require parents wanting their child to be reallocated to a school other than the one offered to actively to request this. At the moment, they are added to a waiting list or reallocation pool automatically.
The full council is due to meet at Hove Town Hall at 4.30pm next Thursday (29 January). The meeting is scheduled to be webcast.
Whilst the council have some noble goals, their approach of rapidly pushing through changes without waiting to assess and learn from the impact is having a profound impact – causing anxiety and stoking division.
Given that these changes impact hundreds of children for 5+ years would it not make more sense to slow down and look at the real world implications and to see if the new approach does cause positive change to school outcomes.
These proposals have led to a profound lack of trust in the council. The way survey results have been altered and added to with feedback from lobby groups to meet the council’s agenda is dishonest. Parents are staying away from the official surveys and will instead have to make their views known at the next election. Councillors are not listening.
My takeaway from this saga, and I am not affected, is that this particular round council leadership (i.e. Jacob Taylor, Bella Sankey) have been surprisingly dishonest in their conduct. These two are not trustworthy in their politics. In their cabinet meetings we have seen them wear a badge of pride that they have ignored the voices of thousands parents worried about sending their 11 year old children on busses for 2 hours a day in the dark of winter. They did not invite or allow criticism or scrutiny and in fact shot it all down. They have stoked division in our Brighton communities, and they stereotyped residents of certain neighbourhoods. They actively that some voices count for more than others. So I am not surprised parents are fed up. Why spend your time engaging with a process when you know the councillors will ignore you and simply spin it all in the end?
In a most recent example, the councillors discovered that their official your voice survey (despite being biased in its set up, again), found that the majority of people were AGAINST the new sibling link changes as they were. So what did they do? They added a NEW survey of responses from a campaign group (that only went to certain people) to completely change the result (so votes against the changes were counted twice!). This is so dishonest. Nobody was fooled by this. So, we are watching a dishonest group of people do whatever they want. It is like trump politics on a local scale.
Now, the conversation turns to ‘how many’ children will be adversely affected, losing their local school, friends, support, and mental health. They call these numbers ‘small’. To those 11 year olds, scared on their way across the city, it won’t feel small at all. It will feel like the councillors don’t care about their lives. They have been sacrificed. At first, I thought they were being incompetent by not doing any real impact analysis of the policies (no attendance, child mental health, air quality, or family economies). But, you can see how thorough this council has been investigating other issues, like transport. Not so for school admissions! Instead, they have been dishonest and opaque. They were dishonest about how a campaign group had inside information as the policies were developed. They failed to consult the affected schools, saddling them with greater needs without any financial support to meet them. They tried to bully schools into submission. If these schools start to become academies en mass, this will be why. It’s a sad state of affairs and not a way to build a city. In the cabinet meetings, this cabal continue to congratulate themselves and pat themselves on the back. Everyone else is the enemy. But they must realise that families have had their lives turned upside down by their negligence are forgotten, scapegoated, and devastated. Even if the council calls it a ‘small number’ please don’t forget these families. I was a labour voter, I will be so glad to see the back of these amateurs. They really don’t care about you, or your children.
No one cared about children taking long bus journey when it was poor children from whitehawk having to do it! No one lobbied for better bus travel for children from whitehawk! now they are making it fairer it is parents of rich children who dont like it!
Georgina, you managed to communicate your prejudice of affected children (as rich), and the brutal divisiveness this circus has brought by the council and campaign groups in just three lines. From what you write here, it sounds here like your goal is to punish those so called ‘rich’ children (and all the rest too) and multiply the city problem for children that are now losing local schooling in the city, rather than improve anything for anyone in Whitehawk travel-wise. Jacob Taylor council calls this approach to fairness, the ‘city child’. Has the journey time or local school access for Whitehawk children really changed? No. They still have to travel far and wide and may now sadly lose the Longhill option too due to this debacle. So, if your innovative idea of ‘fairer’, and your idea of success, is to make far more eleven year old children travel 2 hours in the dark of winter rather than solve the problem for the ones that were affected, that’s on your conscience. Maybe you can spray them with you car as you drive by on a rainy winter day as they make the journey. There will be more targets for you when the sibling link change goes through in the rigged vote. Personally, I would call this view vindictive and prejudiced, more than ‘fairer’. It is cheaper for scoring political points, it appeals to your prejudice and can be implemented in policy as long as you don’t look closely at the details and consequences. It will feel like socialism. Jacob Taylor and Bella Sankey agree with this view. So, you’ve got them to support your prejudice, but I think most of us are waiting for them to move on to their goal of being MPs or mayor of somewhere or whatever. Of course, if anyone on top in Labour sees how incompetent they have been for building trust in communities and in government, maybe we’ll be stuck with them for a while yet.
i dont have a car to spray any one i get the bus from whitehawk like children have done for years, remember rich people voted to stop them making new stanley deason on the top of elm grove too, it all good for you until your children are the ones getting the bus
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lost all faith in the council education department. At the start of this consultation the council said no estimated numbers of impacted children were available, then councillor Taylor said only 8-9 children would be displaced from central schools to commute out of their community (he never explained where the numbers come from), now suddenly the council have published higher numbers after the consultation has closed. I thought the council would be on the side of all families in Brighton. Not any more.
Long overdue that their “head of schools organisation” – the uncaring, blinkered, finance-&-numbers obsessed Richard Barker, is got rid of 😡