Getting our children into school matters. So does the fairness of which school they can go to. We should not have to choose.
We are Class Divide. We come from Whitehawk, in the east of the city. For seven years we have asked one question. Is Brighton and Hove a fair place to go to school if your family is poor?
We are told this is one of the best cities in England to be a disadvantaged child at school. In Whitehawk, for at least 15 years, only about 3 in 10 young people have left school with a pass in English and maths.
Both of these things are said to be true. We would ask you to decide which one you would want to explain to a parent here.
We agree that attendance matters. We have never said otherwise. We published a report this year on why children in our community miss school.
The reasons are not a mystery. A daily bus ticket costs £3.20 because a family cannot find £453.90 for the year. That is nearly 40 per cent more, paid by the people with the least.
One head teacher told us attendance at his school is lowest on a Friday. That is the day the money runs out.
So yes. Get the children through the door. We have been trying to help do exactly that for years, and we will carry on.
But here is where we part company with an idea now being put to the city by Preston Park parent Professor Adam Dennett.
Absence is not a separate problem sitting next to poverty. It is one of the things poverty does. Illness, unmet special needs, the cost of the bus.
These are not the opposite of disadvantage. They are disadvantage, turning up at the school gate.
Think of a damp house. The damp causes mould. The mould makes a child ill. You could measure the mould, treat the mould and decide the damp barely matters. You would be wrong. The damp is the cause. Poverty is the damp. Absence is the mould.
This is why we do not accept that admissions and attendance are rivals or that the city must pick one. They are the same problem at different points. You can work on both. You should.
And there is something no amount of data can settle.
Until recently, families in Whitehawk and the east of the city had one secondary school in their catchment. Families in the centre had a choice of two. The one-school catchments are in the poorest parts of Brighton and Hove.
That was not fair. It did not need a model to prove it. Some children had a choice. Some did not. And which group you were in depended on where your family could afford to live.
The council changed that. We think it was right to.
We are told it is time to move on from admissions. We understand the appeal. But the reforms are barely a year old. They are being independently evaluated. To call them a failure now is not a finding. It is a guess.
Collaboration is not new to us. When the admissions changes were first proposed, back in 2024, we offered to work with everyone at the table to make the policy as fair and as good as it could be.
Some preferred to try to stop the plans altogether rather than improve them. That was their right. But the time to shape these reforms was then.
So now we welcome any offer to work together on attendance. We have been in that room for years. We will be there tomorrow.
But we will not trade one kind of fairness for another. Getting every child into school and giving every child a fair choice of school are not competing goods. A city that is serious about all of its children will do both.
Curtis James is a co-founder of Class Divide.
