is there any point interacting with a consultation when an academy wants to change its criteria?
I know that academies are their own admissions authority. are they accountable to anyone and do they have any wider obligations when setting their criteria?
There is an academy in my home city which is basically the only decent school that most kids in the city have any chance at all of getting a good education at.
the alternatives are - one good faith school that you can only get into if you qualify under strict church attendance.
a couple of good schools in very rich areas that you only get into if you are rich,
various depressing comprehensives which clearly are doing their best but have extremely challenging intakes and plenty of problems.
this academy used to be a private school and converted to an academy in Blair's "Education, Education, Education" years.
Their criteria (excluding obvious sen/looked after that all schools have) are
(1) music specialisation
(2) siblings
(3) random allocation by lottery.
every year the poor alternative options in the city mean that there are about 950 applications for those lottery places, and the number of music specialism places and sibling places means there are typically only about 50 places available for those in the lottery phase - so about a 1 in 19 chance which is grim but at least a hope.
6 years ago this school founded its own primary school. the first cohort that joined reception in 2013 will be applying for year 7 in 2020.
The academy want to change the admission criteria to give kids from the primary school priority before the general lottery. The effect of this will be to almost entirely close admissions to everyone that might otherwise have had a chance.
best case scenario - maybe a handful of those primary kids will be included in the higher priority groups anyway, say 20 out of the 60 - obviously guessing here - so 40 lottery places gone, only 10 lottery places left and now the odds for the rest of us are more like one in 90.
This is a horrific prospect but is there any actual grounds to object?
do they have any obligations to keep any number of places open for "ordinary" applicants?
so they have a right to do whatever they want?
I don't have a lot of energy or emotional resilience and fighting this would probably break me. I will do it for my son's sake if there is any chance of success. if I would just be banging my head against a brick wall and will get nowhere then I might be better off moving to a different city in the 10 months we have till the applications have to be submitted.
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Anyone with experience of the consultation process when an Academy wants to change its entry priorities?
17 replies
PeaQiwiComHequo · 11/12/2018 21:28
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