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.
I went through this year’s secondary admissions process as a parent. When I applied for a primary school place a few years ago, the council’s process included a request for feedback. This year, applying for a secondary place under the complex new arrangements, there was nothing of the kind – no question about how we’d made our choices, no request for feedback on the guidance, nothing that looked like it was feeding into any kind of evaluation.
If these reforms are genuinely being independently evaluated, as has been suggested, I’d be interested to know what that evaluation actually involves, who is carrying it out, and when it started – because nothing in my own experience has suggested any data was being gathered from parents at the point they were actually making these decisions.
It is ironic that Curtis James dismisses Professor Adam Dennett as a “Preston Park parent” who shouldn’t lecture the city, given that Mr James lives more than 300 miles away in rural Cumbria. Unlike local families, he has no children navigating Brighton’s secondary school admissions system or living with the anxiety of its open admissions policy.
Cumberland Council’s admissions arrangements place a strong emphasis on local catchment areas and proximity. Meanwhile Brighton has taken a different approach by introducing a random open admissions allocation. Class Divide has campaigned to increase this from 5% to 30% and has also supported prioritising out-of-catchment siblings. These changes mean more local children missing out on nearby schools and more families facing long and expensive journeys across the city.
Mr James has highlighted that a £3.20 bus fare can prevent disadvantaged children from attending school – yet he supports admissions policies that will increase travel distances and transport costs for hundreds more families across the city.
As Professor Dennett’s analysis highlights, if the goal is to raise attainment, increasing travel distances is likely to be counterproductive. Everything is connected – and attendance is likely to go down as distance to school increases. Rather than engaging with the evidence, Mr James chose to dismiss it because of where Professor Dennett lives.
If Professor Dennett’s analysis is wrong, then challenge the evidence. If it’s right, then we should have the courage to learn from it. That’s how good policy is made. The facts don’t change whether you’re sitting in Brighton and Hove or rural Cumbria.
Thanks for engaging with the piece. A few things worth clearing up.
On where I live: fair challenge, and I’ll own it. I grew up on Bristol Estate, spent the forst 20 years of my life there, and I went to school at St Marks, and then Stanley Deason – most of my family lived in Whitehawk, some in the very early days of its creation, and one my nans still lived there until recently. My work with Class Divide is rooted in Whitehawk, alongside residents and parents who are in that system right now. The piece speaks for them, and I put my name to it on their behalf. Where I sleep at night doesn’t change whether three in ten children in Whitehawk leaving school without English and maths is acceptable. It also won’t stop me commuting to Brighton to do whatever I can to fix our unequal school system.
On the argument: Adam is a parent who has campaigned on this, as is his right, and he’s clearly put a lot of work in. I didn’t dismiss his report, and I’d point you back to the piece. We say attendance matters enormously, that he and other campaigners are right to raise it, and that we welcome working together on it. One of the things we’ve questioned is one step in the reasoning: treating absence and admissions as rival levers, when they run into each other. That’s a disagreement about the argument, not Adam, or about where anyone lives. We’ve set it out, alongside commentary from two senior education researchers. If you think that’s wrong, that’s the conversation I’m happy to have.
On admissions and travel: yes, we have argued for a larger share of open admissions and for sibling priority, and again, I’ll happily stand by that. Here’s why. The old system already made poorer families in the east travel further, to fewer choices, while families in the centre had two schools on their doorstep. Distance and cost didn’t arrive with these reforms. They’ve been built into the system for years. Open admissions is an attempt to share access more fairly, not to hand out longer journeys for their own sake. And the affordability of those journeys, the bus fares, the routes, is exactly what we campaign on, and will keep campaigning on, whoever ends up travelling.
You say we should have the courage to learn from the campaign work Adam is doing. We’re open to that, and always have been. But some things don’t need a model at all. A system that gave some families a choice of two schools and others a choice of one was not fair. That’s the part no analysis settles.
I don’t think he dismisses Professor Dennets work, but its fair to point out he’s a Preston Park resident. He’s living in the area that benefits from the current admissions process, and does not have experience of living in an area with no school choice.
Mr James on the other hand grew up in Whitehawk so has first hand experience of the poverty there. Further to this there’s the experience of his years of work with Class Divide.
Both approaches have merit, but I trust the experience of the man with boots on the ground.
I’d say that this isn’t entirely about attainment. That may be the council’s stated reason, but its also about fairness, and the idea that your education should not be dependent on where you live. The poorest in our city should have the same level of choice as the richest. It’s a principle that I think Open Admissions and Sibling Link policies work towards.
Class divide represents Whitehawk and if you’ve listened to the podcast you’ll know that’s where Curtis James grew up and went to school. In every school admissions consultation in recent memory Whitehawk (and Brighton’s other large areas of social housing) have been essentially voiceless, with the debate dominated by other areas of the city. Class divide changed that. The big win for Whitehawk in the recent changes is that Whitehawk children are now in catchment for what most people consider to be its best schools (Varndean and Dorothy Stringer). They could also attend BACA and Longhill, so lots of choice. We can disagree with what they pushed for (I thought 30% open admissions was too much), but you might speculate there were elements of ask for a pony if you want a hamster.