Summary for Deputation to the People Overview and Scrutiny Committee Meeting on 14^th January

Following the earlier engagement exercise, Councillor Taylor said that the level of opposition to increasing the length of journeys to school had been “heard loud and clear”. However, the Council is now consulting on a new proposal that again increases travel distances and divides communities by forcing nearly 250 randomly selected children to travel long distances across the city instead of attending a school in their catchment area. The Council appears not to have thought through the implications of its own proposals. The Parent Support Group has tried to do some of this analysis, and we think the Council needs to say whether it agrees with its projections. If the Council cannot do this, we believe it highlights the problems of a rushed process that is not backed up by proper evidence.

Our analysis suggests that children living in the Stringer/Varndean catchment area who do not have a sibling link and are not eligible for free school meals would only have a 25% chance of getting into a catchment area school. This would be lower than the chances for a child applying from outside the catchment area under the proposed open admissions priority. The Council has made no mention of what would happen to these children. After being unable to access a school in their catchment area, they would then be given the lowest priority for schools in other catchment areas because they had a “choice” of schools not to get into. This means they would only be likely to get into a school with surplus places, which would probably be one of the schools furthest from where they live. Children in the Blatchington Mill/Hove Park catchment area would face a similar situation.

Councillor Tayor has stated that the main aim of the Council’s proposals is to improve attainment in the city. There is a large body of literature including recent government reports, which states that the best way to improve attainment is through reducing school absence and particularly persistent absence. Brighton and Hove has a more serious problem with persistent absence than most other local authorities in England. It is absence over and above any other factor, including concentrations of disadvantage, that is leading to any reduced levels of attainment observed in the city. The Council has misdiagnosed a perceived ‘problem’ of disadvantaged attainment and has failed to acknowledge publicly in any part of the October engagement or the latest consultation that persistent absence is the #1 problem facing the city’s schools and hindering the attainment of its pupils.

As a consequence of misdiagnosing the problem, the Council’s proposals not only fail to address the underlying issue, but actually stand to make it much worse. Requiring children to travel longer distances to school and the resulting disconnection between local community, family and school is virtually guaranteed to exacerbate the attendance problem and thus drive down attainment.

Signed by: Adam Dennett (lead spokesperson), Matthew Boote, Imogen Miles, Laura Ward, Chris Reynolds, Tom Harrison, Hazel Reynolds, Sally Wright, Paul Bunkham, Laura Wade, Mark Kennedy, Dan Campbell