The Government has published draft legislation seeking to bring many reforms to the school sector. The headlines are understandably about the registration of children who are not currently attending school, however, the Bill also brings change to school admissions.
The Bill legislates for ‘co-operation between schools and local authorities’. Academy schools are currently their own admission authorities and do not need any input from Local Authorities. However, this will change, with academies required to cooperate with local authorities on admissions. The detail of how this will work in practice is vague at this stage, but CF has long argued that schools should not be solely responsible for setting their own admissions, but a local body, with the interests of the community at heart, would be better placed to have this power.
In 2018 CF patron Fiona Millar said, “The pressure of external performance measures has inevitably led to some schools finding more and more ingenious ways of using their admissions freedoms to change their intakes. Selection by faith, aptitude, catchment area, feeder school and complicated banding systems which seek to group children into different ability bands, can lead to some schools engineering themselves more socially selective, aspirant and high achieving intakes than other neighbouring institutions”
This point still stands, and CF will be following the Bill’s progress with interest. Of course, much more needs to be done, and the government has no current plan to tackle the unfairness of 11-plus and other test admissions. However, the new Bill might give opportunity for MPs to table amendments relating to this unfair exam.
