Facts

The city’s schools already perform well for its children, and we should celebrate this – attainment is above average for both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students. Challenges are isolated and need targeted solutions.
Brighton schools are already more socially mixed than in 2/3 of other LEAs in the country. The new FSM priority will likely increase the mix of disadvantaged students further.
The complex mix of priorities in the proposal makes it hard for families to understand the impact on them. Can you explain them? The School Admissions Code is clear that this is not allowed. It states, “Parents should be able to look at a set of arrangements and understand easily how places for that school will be allocated.”
Stacking of FSM within priorities won’t smooth to city average, but shift concentrations to different schools.
The council predicts 250 displaced students in 2026. This includes 144 from the V/DS catchment, 57 from the HP/B catchment, and 44 from Patcham.
Under these proposals, after 5 years, once all secondary school year groups are in place, 1,250 children will be displaced from their catchments by 2,000 more opting in via ‘open ballot’. Over 3,000 students (about 1/3 of the city) may be attending schools outside their catchment area, far from home.
This displacement is intentional. It happens for several reasons: the proposed open admission priority, changes to catchment areas, fewer places at Dorothy Stringer and Blatchington Mill, and more spots for children eligible for free school meals.
Children unable to get a place and living in the catchment areas of Dorothy Stringer/Varndean and Hove Park/Blatchington Mill would then be the lowest priority for places in other schools. They would probably only be able to get a place at one of the schools farthest from where they live. This risk mainly affects children without a sibling in secondary school and who aren’t eligible for free school meals.
These children would have to travel much further than is typical in England. Their journeys would exceed those of children in other cities.
Asking children to travel further to school will impact:
- children’s mental and physical well-being. They are less likely to arrive at school ready to learn.
- the city’s transport network; increasing car use and associated impacts. Car journeys are rising. They are now the second most common way to get to secondary school, after walking. They have overtaken public transport. (26% travel to secondary school by car, 20% by public transport and 50% walk). National data shows that when journeys go over two miles, car use goes up.
- local communities and friendship groups by breaking the link between home and the local school.
- working families though making increasing the challenges of balancing caring and work
- higher costs of travel where children do need to take the bus. This will either need to be funded by the council or by families, many of whom are struggling with the cost of living
SEND children are likely to feel these impacts much more than others. They are unlikely to receive a higher priority under the admissions priorities. Only 7 children were admitted under ‘priority 2’ for exceptional cases in 2024, and 4 children in 2023.
The proposals cite research by Prof Gorard. He finds only a weak link between school disadvantage and attainment. He focuses on the effects of choosing to attend different schools, not of being forced to travel long distances. Recent detailed analysis of Brighton and Hove’s local situation by Prof Adam Dennett, shows the weak relationship disappears at concentrations of children on FSM found in Brighton and Hove schools.
The 20% open allocation is not the ‘marginal ballot’ proposed in the Sutton Trust paper. They suggest a random ballot just for a proportion of places at the spatial margin, with the rest allocated based on distance. Dr Ellen Greaves said at the Scrutiny Committee “There’s a case for thinking carefully about this policy in combination with the lottery tiebreaker”. The Sutton Trust also says that all unsuccessful applicants should be in the random ballot, not just those from specific areas.
The Social Mobility Commission found that a school’s absence rate is the best predictor of its pupil premium students’ progress. To improve the attainment of disadvantaged students, we must reduce persistent absence. This should be our top priority.
There is evidence that longer journey times to school are linked to higher absence rates
Families are already able to choose schools outside of their catchment school. 35% of the Longhill catchment’s children attend Longhill. 47% of the BACA catchment’s children attend BACA. 57% of the PACA catchment’s children attend PACA. 72% of the Patcham catchment’s children attend Patcham. Other children have chosen to attend a different school. This might be a school in another catchment, outside Brighton and Hove, or a faith school. You can see where all the children go in the FOI data in this datasheet.
Much of the debate has focused on views that children in the Dorothy Stringer and Varndean catchment are all from privileged backgrounds. The catchment has a diverse social mix, with the % of children on FSM at the city average (at 29%). It already covers one of the three most deprived areas in the city. If the catchment change goes ahead, it will then cover two of the three most deprived areas: Whitehawk and Hollingdean. Children in these areas are as likely to be harmed by these proposals as those from more advantaged backgrounds.
A PAN of 210 for Longhill is high compared to the number of students it has admitted in recent years. The last time it admitted 200 students was in 2014.
Many of the city’s secondary schools and teachers don’t support the proposals.
Those at the top of the tree in UK education don’t support the proposals - Sir Jon Coles (former DG UK Department for Education): 20th Jan, twitter - “Truly extraordinary proposals from @BrightonHoveCC based on some very shaky pseudo-academic evidence. Surely no-one wants a return to council-led social engineering by busing? Maybe improving the weak schools would be a better strategy…”
The Sutton Trust have made no institutional statement of support for these specific proposals and said “We have therefore not commented on the detail of the proposals from Brighton and Hove, as we believe that they and the local stakeholders responding to the consultation are best placed to know what will work locally”
Prof Stephen Gorard, Durham University said “Obviously it’s got to be done with the minimum of disruption. You don’t want to upset children’s one shot at education and you don’t want to have other unintended consequences that make things worse”
Dr Ellen Greaves has said to “Evaluate what happens with the free school meals policy before changing much else”
The consultation and scrutiny of the proposals has been inadequate, with reasonable concerns sidelined. If the Council has confidence in its proposals, why has it been so reluctant to present the full implications of its proposals or to consider other options? Serious questions have been raised about the lawfulness of the entire process.

PSG views on the proposals

If these proposals go through, it will create huge uncertainty and worry for families about which school their children will attend.
Randomly selecting children to be sent to the school’s that are furthest from where they live is bound to be unpopular. It is manifestly unfair and goes against the wishes of the city clearly expressed in the engagement exercise.
Any policy not supported by strong evidence, with dubious gains, serious negatives and opposed by most of the city is weak policy and destined to fail – Labour voters expect better and will not forget.
Longhill will continue to be a problem unless it is moved from its current location or supported to be a much smaller school in its current location (i.e. through federation with another school).
Poor preparation and mismanagement of the process has led to an information vacuum which despite the best efforts of many trying to make sense of the situation, has inevitably become filled with divisive rhetoric. Wounds that have been opened and division sewn between the cities communities that could and should have been avoided. These may take some time to heal and the blame falls entirely on the council.

PSG Councillor Solutions Sheet – A Road Map to a sustainable solution for the city

What is the alternative? What can create a sustainable long-term, equitable solution for the city?

SLOW DOWN and stop the current proposals before you cause serious damage.
Be prepared to acknowledge mistakes have been made – people value honesty
Find a short-term solution to buy time for a longer-term, sustainable solution that has buy-in from across the city. This sticking plaster must be a temporary patch. It should be acceptable to most. It must cover immediate issues to buy time. For example, reduce PAN at Longhill. Support a smaller size by federating with another city school. Allow access to Stringer/Varndean for Whitehawk if it’s a priority. But, do not displace children already in the catchment. If the Council wants to add more children to a catchment, it must make enough places available.
Understand what the process of making good policy should look like. Take advice / carry out research on best practice in evidence-based or evidence-informed policy making and, if necessary, undergo training to avoid making the same mistakes again.
1. Be clear about what problems you are trying to solve. Too many different issues have been bundled together in this process, and the school admissions process may not be an appropriate tool for some of the problems.
2. Look into how multiple groups could be brought into the design process further down the line and the best ways for managing this
3. Explore methodologies from geodesign to codesign for facilitating collective input – there are multiple examples do draw upon from domains such as health. Get expert advice on this.
Understand your system. Commission a comprehensive piece (or pieces) of open, publicly available, reproducible research (you can start with the experts in the city and in-house in the council) which profiles the current secondary education system in the city, contextualising it with relevant national and local comparisons, including:
1. The spatial system of schools, pupils and their residential locations (disaggregated by relevant demographics - disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged or SEND etc.) and accessibilities – by walking and public transport in particular.
2. A deep dive on the schools themselves and their recent trajectories.
  1. What are the profiles, strengths and weakness of each of the city’s schools (Quantitative and Qualitative)?
  2. What are their trajectories of growth/improvement, stasis or decline?
  3. How do these compare locally and nationally so that we can derive a meaningful context?
  4. Look at what travel distances are typical in other comparable towns and cities. Consider whether people are likely to accept higher levels of uncertainty and longer travel distances than in other places, and whether it is reasonable to expect them to do so.
3. Gravity and location allocation modelling to determine the suitability of current sizes and locations of schools relative to pupil home locations now and in the future.
  1. Test scenarios for alternative or more optimal configurations
4. A full review of alternatives to the current catchment-based system of allocation. This will require examining and modelling a range of solutions which might include
  1. a return to distance-based tie-breaks, but with true marginal ballots at the margins
  2. overlapping catchments
  3. no catchments at all, but with other priorities
  4. and a selection of alternative methods optimised for desirable outcome such as accessibility or social mixing.
5. Commission other specific pieces of academic research that might also be relevant (travel, attainment, disadvantage, absence), but that focus in on the City of Brighton and Hove specifically to help develop a broad understanding. Make all findings and research public and easily accessible. Feed these back into the later design stage
Clearly define each of your problems separately and don’t conflate them – it is likely a review may reveal priorities like:
1. p1 – Longhill financial viability, location, size, outcomes
2. p2 – Raising attainment
3. p3 – (In)accessibility of Whitehawk
Decide which of these are most important – rank your priorities and design solutions separately. Don’t assume the problem is due to school admissions arrangements if there are more obvious explanations.
Decide what theories and methods that underpin the observations of your system can be brought to bear to influence new designs to tackle each priority problem? Which ones might be most relevant to your system? Which ones might not?
What models might we be able to use to try different scenarios/designs to understand what the benefits and drawbacks of the different designs there might be? Use these models to run tests and understand the potential consequences of any decisions.
Decide what might be the best set of alternative designs to consult further on. Do this with an open mind and without preconceived ideas. Allow time for iteration and revision. What information do we need to provide in order that people can make an informed contribution to the debate?
Gather evidence, iterate, try some new designs based on the feedback. Consult properly, then maybe put forward a proposal.

![](images/PSG-flyer-V2-300x261.png){fig-align="right"} # Facts 1. The city’s schools already perform well for its children, and we should celebrate this – attainment is above average for both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students. Challenges are isolated and need targeted solutions. 2. Brighton schools are already more socially mixed than in 2/3 of other LEAs in the country. The new FSM priority will likely increase the mix of disadvantaged students further. 3. The complex mix of priorities in the proposal makes it hard for families to understand the impact on them. Can you explain them? The School Admissions Code is clear that this is not allowed. It states, "Parents should be able to look at a set of arrangements and understand easily how places for that school will be allocated." 4. Stacking of FSM within priorities won't smooth to city average, but shift concentrations to different schools. 5. The council predicts 250 displaced students in 2026. This includes 144 from the V/DS catchment, 57 from the HP/B catchment, and 44 from Patcham. 6. Under these proposals, after 5 years, once all secondary school year groups are in place, 1,250 children will be displaced from their catchments by 2,000 more opting in via 'open ballot'. Over 3,000 students (about 1/3 of the city) may be attending schools outside their catchment area, far from home. 7. This displacement is intentional. It happens for several reasons: the proposed open admission priority, changes to catchment areas, fewer places at Dorothy Stringer and Blatchington Mill, and more spots for children eligible for free school meals. 8. Children unable to get a place and living in the catchment areas of Dorothy Stringer/Varndean and Hove Park/Blatchington Mill would then be the lowest priority for places in other schools. They would probably only be able to get a place at one of the schools farthest from where they live. This risk mainly affects children without a sibling in secondary school and who aren't eligible for free school meals. 9. These children would have to travel much further than is typical in England. Their journeys would exceed those of children in other cities. 10. Asking children to travel further to school will impact: - children's mental and physical well-being. They are less likely to arrive at school ready to learn. - the city’s transport network; increasing car use and associated impacts. Car journeys are rising. They are now the second most common way to get to secondary school, after walking. They have overtaken public transport. (26% travel to secondary school by car, 20% by public transport and 50% walk). National data shows that when journeys go over two miles, car use goes up. - local communities and friendship groups by breaking the link between home and the local school. - working families though making increasing the challenges of balancing caring and work - higher costs of travel where children do need to take the bus. This will either need to be funded by the council or by families, many of whom are struggling with the cost of living 11. SEND children are likely to feel these impacts much more than others. They are unlikely to receive a higher priority under the admissions priorities. Only 7 children were admitted under ‘priority 2’ for exceptional cases in 2024, and 4 children in 2023. 12. The proposals cite research by Prof Gorard. He finds only a weak link between school disadvantage and attainment. He focuses on the effects of choosing to attend different schools, not of being forced to travel long distances. Recent detailed analysis of Brighton and Hove’s local situation by Prof Adam Dennett, shows the weak relationship disappears at concentrations of children on FSM found in Brighton and Hove schools. 13. The 20% open allocation is *not* the ‘marginal ballot’ proposed in the Sutton Trust paper. They suggest a random ballot just for a proportion of places at the spatial margin, with the rest allocated based on distance. Dr Ellen Greaves said at the Scrutiny Committee *“There’s a case for thinking carefully about this policy in combination with the lottery tiebreaker”*. The Sutton Trust also says that all unsuccessful applicants should be in the random ballot, not just those from specific areas. 14. The Social Mobility Commission found that a school's absence rate is the best predictor of its pupil premium students' progress. To improve the attainment of disadvantaged students, we must reduce persistent absence. This should be our top priority. 15. There is evidence that longer journey times to school are linked to higher absence rates 16. Families are already able to choose schools outside of their catchment school. 35% of the Longhill catchment's children attend Longhill. 47% of the BACA catchment's children attend BACA. 57% of the PACA catchment's children attend PACA. 72% of the Patcham catchment's children attend Patcham. Other children have chosen to attend a different school. This might be a school in another catchment, outside Brighton and Hove, or a faith school. You can see where all the children go in the FOI data in this datasheet. 17. Much of the debate has focused on views that children in the Dorothy Stringer and Varndean catchment are all from privileged backgrounds. The catchment has a diverse social mix, with the % of children on FSM at the city average (at 29%). It already covers one of the three most deprived areas in the city. If the catchment change goes ahead, it will then cover two of the three most deprived areas: Whitehawk and Hollingdean. Children in these areas are as likely to be harmed by these proposals as those from more advantaged backgrounds. 18. A PAN of 210 for Longhill is high compared to the number of students it has admitted in recent years. The last time it admitted 200 students was in 2014. 19. Many of the city’s secondary schools and teachers don’t support the proposals. 20. Those at the top of the tree in UK education don’t support the proposals - Sir Jon Coles (former DG UK Department for Education): 20th Jan, twitter - “Truly extraordinary proposals from [\@BrightonHoveCC](https://x.com/BrightonHoveCC) based on some very shaky pseudo-academic evidence. Surely no-one wants a return to council-led social engineering by busing? Maybe improving the weak schools would be a better strategy...” 21. The Sutton Trust have made no institutional statement of support for these specific proposals and said *“We have therefore not commented on the detail of the proposals from Brighton and Hove, as we believe that they and the local stakeholders responding to the consultation are best placed to know what will work locally”* 22. Prof Stephen Gorard, Durham University said *“Obviously it’s got to be done with the minimum of disruption. You don’t want to upset children’s one shot at education and you don’t want to have other unintended consequences that make things worse”* 23. Dr Ellen Greaves has said to *“Evaluate what happens with the free school meals policy before changing much else”* 24. The consultation and scrutiny of the proposals has been inadequate, with reasonable concerns sidelined. If the Council has confidence in its proposals, why has it been so reluctant to present the full implications of its proposals or to consider other options? Serious questions have been raised about the lawfulness of the entire process. # PSG views on the proposals - If these proposals go through, it will create huge uncertainty and worry for families about which school their children will attend. - Randomly selecting children to be sent to the school’s that are furthest from where they live is bound to be unpopular. It is manifestly unfair and goes against the wishes of the city clearly expressed in the engagement exercise. - Any policy not supported by strong evidence, with dubious gains, serious negatives and opposed by most of the city is *weak policy* and destined to fail – Labour voters expect better and will not forget. - Longhill will continue to be a problem unless it is moved from its current location or supported to be a much smaller school in its current location (i.e. through federation with another school). - Poor preparation and mismanagement of the process has led to an information vacuum which despite the best efforts of many trying to make sense of the situation, has inevitably become filled with divisive rhetoric. Wounds that have been opened and division sewn between the cities communities that could and should have been avoided. These may take some time to heal and the blame falls entirely on the council. # PSG Councillor Solutions Sheet – A Road Map to a sustainable solution for the city What is the alternative? What can create a sustainable long-term, equitable solution for the city? 1. **SLOW DOWN** and stop the current proposals before you cause serious damage. 2. **Be prepared to acknowledge mistakes have been made –** people value honesty 3. **Find a short-term solution** to buy time for a longer-term, sustainable solution that has buy-in from across the city. This sticking plaster must be a temporary patch. It should be acceptable to most. It must cover immediate issues to buy time. For example, reduce PAN at Longhill. Support a smaller size by federating with another city school. Allow access to Stringer/Varndean for Whitehawk if it's a priority. But, do not displace children already in the catchment. If the Council wants to add more children to a catchment, it must make enough places available. 4. **Understand what the *process* of making good policy should look like**. Take advice / carry out research on best practice in evidence-based or evidence-informed policy making and, if necessary, undergo training to avoid making the same mistakes again. 1. Be clear about what problems you are trying to solve. Too many different issues have been bundled together in this process, and the school admissions process may not be an appropriate tool for some of the problems. 2. Look into how multiple groups could be brought into the design process further down the line and the best ways for managing this 3. Explore methodologies from [geodesign](https://www-igcollab.hub.arcgis.com/) to [codesign](https://communities.sunlightfoundation.com/action/codesign/) for facilitating collective input – there are multiple examples do draw upon from domains such as health. Get expert advice on this. 5. **Understand your system**. Commission a comprehensive piece (or pieces) of **open**, **publicly available**, **reproducible** research (you can start with the experts in the city and in-house in the council) which profiles the current secondary education system in the city, contextualising it with relevant national and local comparisons, including: 1. The spatial system of schools, pupils and their residential locations (disaggregated by relevant demographics - disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged or SEND etc.) and accessibilities – by walking and public transport in particular. 2. A deep dive on the schools themselves and their recent trajectories. 1. What are the profiles, strengths and weakness of each of the city’s schools (Quantitative and Qualitative)? 2. What are their trajectories of growth/improvement, stasis or decline? 3. How do these compare locally and nationally so that we can derive a meaningful context? 4. Look at what travel distances are typical in other comparable towns and cities. Consider whether people are likely to accept higher levels of uncertainty and longer travel distances than in other places, and whether it is reasonable to expect them to do so. 3. Gravity and location allocation modelling to determine the suitability of current sizes and locations of schools relative to pupil home locations now and in the future. 1. Test scenarios for alternative or more optimal configurations 4. A full review of alternatives to the current catchment-based system of allocation. This will require examining and modelling a range of solutions which might include 1. a return to distance-based tie-breaks, but with true marginal ballots at the margins 2. overlapping catchments 3. no catchments at all, but with other priorities 4. and a selection of alternative methods optimised for desirable outcome such as accessibility or social mixing. 5. Commission other specific pieces of academic research that might also be relevant (travel, attainment, disadvantage, absence), but that focus in on the City of Brighton and Hove specifically to help develop a broad understanding. Make all findings and research public and easily accessible. Feed these back into the later design stage 6. **Clearly define each of your problems** separately and don’t conflate them – it is likely a review may reveal priorities like: 1. p1 – Longhill financial viability, location, size, outcomes 2. p2 – Raising attainment 3. p3 – (In)accessibility of Whitehawk Decide which of these are most important – rank your priorities and design solutions separately. Don’t assume the problem is due to school admissions arrangements if there are more obvious explanations. 7. Decide what theories and methods that underpin the observations of your system can be brought to bear to influence new designs to tackle each priority problem? Which ones might be most relevant to your system? Which ones might not? 8. What models might we be able to use to try different scenarios/designs to understand what the benefits and drawbacks of the different designs there might be? Use these models to run tests and understand the potential consequences of any decisions. 9. Decide what might be the best set of alternative designs to consult further on. Do this with an open mind and without preconceived ideas. Allow time for iteration and revision. What information do we need to provide in order that people can make an informed contribution to the debate? 10. Gather evidence, iterate, try some new designs based on the feedback. Consult properly, then maybe put forward a proposal.