So the Education Secretary wants to stop Fair Admissions Campaigners from reporting suspected breaches of the Admissions Code to the adjudicator, even though 41 of the 42 cases they brought last year were fully or partially upheld:
www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/faith-school-complaints-ban-is-affront-to-democracy-campaigners-say-a6833531.html
That means it'll be down to "local parents" to check whether schools are compliant or not, and to raise issues with the admissions adjudicator. The National Admissions Code is a pretty complex document - how many parents that you know have actually read it, let alone checked whether the schools they're applying to are following it?
The code is very complicated for schools to understand too, and apparently many don't bother reading it properly, so hundreds of (mostly unintentional) breaches are found every year, and the Schools Adjudicator's Annual Report implies that could just be the tip of the iceberg with 12% of Local Authorities reporting themselves as not confident that all schools in their area are code compliant.
To be fair I suspect some of the systematic breaches the Fair Admissions Campaign found in Faith School admissions could have been found in a similarly sized sample of non-Faith-school admissions too, but certainly not all of them as faith school admissions do tend to be relatively complex. This relates to one of the main findings of the adjudicator's report: "The admission arrangements for many schools that are their own admission authority are unnecessarily complex and lack transparency, especially those with numerous subcategories within individual oversubscription criteria. Such arrangements are difficult to understand and limit parents’ ability to assess the chance of their child being offered a place."
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Have you checked your local school's admissions criteria against the admissions code?
20 replies
geneticLottery · 26/01/2016 22:53
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tiggytape ·
27/01/2016 18:30
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