Agenda item - Chair's Communications

The Chair stated:

We are all ambitious for our city’s schools. We want every child to have a great education and a great school experience. Secondary school is where future careers can be shaped, where lifelong friendships form and where vital life skills are learned, inside and outside of the classroom. But it can also be when some children are left behind, leading to poor employment opportunities and social problems that can persist for generations. This is an issue where the political and the personal can be in contradiction. People’s aspirations for the city or for education in general, can be very different when viewed from the perspective of your own child, or your own neighbourhood. No child is more important than another. We have a responsibility to support all our schools, so that they can ensure every child reaches their full potential.

School catchment areas inspire strong emotions precisely because they are so important. Successive administrations of all colours have struggled to resolve it. There is no perfect or obvious answer, but that is no reason to duck the issue. It is why each party has sought to come together on this working group to find the best answer we can, to understand the balance we have to strike, and take responsibility - on behalf of those that elect us - for making the difficult choices. That’s why our mission over the coming months, and beyond, is to support all of our family of schools, to dispel any myths or incorrect assumptions some may make about our schools and to challenge those who put some of our schools and teachers down.  We need to be here to support all our schools and highlight the good work that they do.

This year our secondary schools bucked the trend nationally and improved on their GCSE results, against a backdrop of a national drop in results. We need to build on that success, and give parents, children and schools the confidence that our aim is for all schools to achieve excellence.

The cross party working group brought councillors from all parties together, to agree and bring a proposal forward. We did that in the clear understanding that there will always be some parents and children disappointed by the results, just as some will be given opportunities that had previously been closed to them. There is no ‘silver bullet’, no perfect answer that satisfies everyone. That’s why, when this group was formed, we set out six priorities to inform our decisions. We understood that no final proposal could satisfy all of them equally, but striking the best balance between them would ensure an equitable and deliverable outcome. One measure the group was clear on was to ensure those children from disadvantaged circumstances were not excluded. Hence we are proposing that eligibility for free school meals is taken into account.  Throughout March and April we carried out over twenty engagement events with the public and presented three different ideas of how the admission arrangements could work. I attended twelve of these engagement meetings across the city and although it was clear that there were many different views, there were some common themes. This working group has taken the feedback from these events as evidence in our work, as well as evidence from head teachers, governors and councillors of all parties. The group has debated the issues extensively, and we have emerged with the proposals set out in the committee paper before us.

Considering the importance of this issue, and the efforts of those who took the time to contribute to this proposal, I hope it is something we can use to demonstrate to the public that all parties can work together, with shared goals, to improve both educational attainment and social mobility in the city.Of course, the council must not only address the schools children attend today, but how capacity can be extended in the future.

I was hoping that, today, we could put forward final proposals that would go out to formal consultation in a few weeks and so it is disappointing that the location of the new University of Brighton free school has not been confirmed. Understandably we cannot go out to formal consultation without a confirmed site for the new school. I can assure everyone that the council is working with the University of Brighton and external stakeholders, to confirm the site as soon as possible. Once the site is confirmed then this cross party working group will reconvene to discuss next steps.

Finally, I would like to record a few thanks from me and the group. It’s important to thank the officers who have put a great deal of effort into this piece of work, by producing numerous documents and modelling different scenarios for the cross party working group to consider. They also organised and ran more than twenty engagement meetings across the city earlier this year. Thank you to the head teachers and governors that attended the admissions working group. Their experience and knowledge was incredibly valuable to the process. I would like to thank fellow councillors from all parties for their contributions to the working group, and the constructive way we have put party politics to one side in the interests of the city’s young people.

It was noted that this was the last meeting of the Youth Council representative Krisztian Darvas. He thanked Krisztian for contributions to the Committee and wished him well for the future.