The number of applications to a primary school where the council wants to slash places has risen by more than 75%.
If Brighton and Hove City Council had cut the number of forms at St Luke’s Primary School from three to two this year, more than half of the 135 families wanting their child to go there as first choice would have been unsuccessful.
The school is on the verge of submitting its appeal to the Office of the Schools Adjudictor against plans to cut it from 2025.
The furthest a child without a sibling link or other priority who was offered a place lives from the school is 767.4m – slightly more than other surrounding schools but about half the distance of most other oversubscribed schools in the city.
Meanwhile, total applications across the city were up 2.5% from 2,224 to 2,280, and the number of children getting into their first choice school fell slightly from 2,103 pupils or 94.5% to 2,084 pupils or 91.4%.
Head of St Luke’s Simon Wattam said: “Governors and staff at St Luke’s were extremely pleased to see the rise in applications to the school and to know that we will again fill in our 90 places in Reception this September.
“We are only sorry that we do not have places for all of the families who wanted to join us this year.
“It is even more clear now that the council’s decision to reduce the number of places at St Luke’s will significantly frustrate parental preference in future years, and this will form the basis of our referral to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator when appealing against this decision.”
Councillor Jacob Taylor, co-chair of the council’s Children, Families and School’s Committee, said: “With more than a fifth of primary school places currently empty and forecasts showing pupil numbers continuing to fall, more and more of our schools are finding themselves in a difficult financial position, without the resources needed.
“That’s because schools are funded on a per pupil basis. If they are short on pupils – they get less funding from government to provide the breadth of education, and support for SEND pupils, that they’d like to.
“This is why we’ve taken tough decisions in the best interests of all pupils in the city – including reducing the size of some of the larger schools. This will ensure other primary schools in the city are fuller, better funded, and more sustainable.”
“We will always endeavour to offer as many children as possible a place at their first-choice school – with 91.4% of pupils securing their first preference ahead of this September.
“Reducing admission numbers is the right thing to do and all schools are being asked to play their part to avoid future potential closures.”
The other schools which are appealing council plans to shrink intakes from 90 to 60 are Patcham Infant, which offered 79 places this year, and Goldstone Primary, which offered 90. Patcham had 70 first preferences and Goldstone 87.
The council has previously said it wants larger schools to shrink to ensure smaller schools can fill their places, as pupil numbers in the city have been falling – although this year has seen a slight increase.
All the other schools surrounding St Luke’s were also oversubscribed, except Queens Park, which was rated as requires improvement by Ofsted last year.
This school was also earmarked to reduce its intake, from 60 to 30, but these plans were dropped. This year, 44 children who put it down as first second or third preference have been offered a place there.
The furthest a child without a sibling link or other priority who was offered a place lives from the school is 767.4m – slightly more than other surrounding schools but about half the distance of most other oversubscribed schools in the city.
Other schools where plans to drop intakes have been abandoned by the council in recent years are also still struggling to fill places, mostly on the outskirts of the city on estates where former council homes have been converted to student housing.
Bevendean Primary School, intake 60, has offered 36 places; Coldean Primary, intake 60, has offered 34 places; Carden Primary, intake 60, has offered 41 places.
Children who don’t get any of their three preferences are offered a place at the nearest school with free places.
Looks like somebody at the council got the math wrong ? Cue wailing about budgets. Council not fit for purpose.
Simon Wattam clearly stated that as it was a “Low birth rate year”- we’d almost certainly get our 1st choice school.. This was on our group tour of the school. He’s mislead parents to strengthen the school’s funding and fight against cuts. I don’t blame him but it clearly wasn’t true for 50+ St. Luke’s applicants. This action will directly contribute to other schools risking closure, due to their number of applications falling.
The pupils not getting entry to this school will either get a place in one of the alternative schools the parrets listed or just allocated to a school with places.
The school will not be able to exceed the number of authorised places.
There seems to be confusion at the Council about primary school numbers. In the light of St Luke’s, maybe revisiting the decision of closing two popular schools?
There isn’t any confusion over the number of children needing a primary school place, the number of places available to serve them and the number of excess places that needs to be removed from the school system.
One school attracting a higher number of applications than in previous years doesn’t take away the need to remove excess places across the city.
Allowing this school to admit more pupils means another will have a class cut or having to close.
Come on muesli mointanieers your kids need this skool – ask Bella which school she went to ….0r is there a NDA in place?
Don’t shrink it. Leave it alone.
This tinkermania with our schools needs to stop.
Bizarre that the council chooses to reduce in size a school that has a high demand for places and a good Oftsed rating. The obvious solution would be to just reduce schools that are dreadful to one form entry or even merge them and just keep the best-performing staff.
As another parent noted, when we were shown round the school this year, the headmaster reiterated several times that because of the low birth rate, if you put St Luke’s first you would get a place.
I had my suspicions as firstly, the schools don’t decide the places and secondly, I was aware of the threat of it going down to a 2 form year. Even so we put it first as it’s supposed to be the best even though we are closer to other schools.
Now we have found out that we haven’t got any places from our 3 choices and this is a direct result of having been misled and putting a school that we might not have done.
The headmasters quotes above only go to confirm all my suspicions and I think it’s a disgrace.
The commenters don’t really understand the need to shrink the ‘popular schools’. These numbers in this article prove that St Lukes needs to shrink it’s intake. By taking all the pupils (and all the funding, as schools are paid per pupil) it means that other Brighton schools are getting in a bad way, as they have so many empty places, as all the kids are being squished into St Lukes. Take St Bartholomew’s, small schools like this with lots of unfilled places, because kids are all heading for the ‘popular’ big schools . And now it’s having to close. Look at the school numbers for some of the areas such as Bevendean and Coldean. Lots of empty seats. Lots of kids from Bevendean going to schools like St Lukes, because they can, because they have 90 places a year to offer. Move this number down to 60 and then only the very local kids will go to St Lukes and other kids will then go to some of the other schools and fill up those empty seats. Don’t forget the schools are funded per pupil, so a half empty school means no money for support staff. It’s actually quite selfish of these big schools to campaign to keep those large numbers and large sums of money for their own school. I wish St Luke would consider the small schools (small schools that tend to be in the low income areas by the way) and not try to keep all the funding to themselves. It’s unfair of them!
I should put this in the article, but the furthest a child without a sibling link or other priority who was offered a place lives from the school is about 750m. So no children from Bevendean, all very local.
This council are not fit for purpose.
You say this all the time, and never substantiate yourself, Lyn.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the surge in applications was done as a form of protest. Actually, quite a clever way of doing it. Although, a trend would be better than a point, and certainly something to watch carefully over the next couple of years.
With the book of additional houses being built and developed, the city’s needs will change, and provisions across the board will need to adapt accordingly.
I’m not clear here on how you think the protest would have come about? Are you saying the school has persuaded lots of parents to risk messing up their child’s school application to make a point on its behalf?
I’m pretty sure that anyone putting St Luke’s down as a first preference genuinely wanted their child to go there.
No matter how many applications the school gets they will only be able to admit children upto the number of authorised admissions.
When is St Luke’s going to understand that by reducing PANs means saving schools across the city? Or do they only care about themselves?! The amount of self-importance here is shocking. Sorry, but it’s tough for the whole system and they need to play their part.
You only seem to care about saving teachers jobs. It is in the kids best interest to go to the best schools and this is by far and away better than some others in the area that are amongst the worst in the country according to Ofsted. Schools with too few pupils cannot afford specialist support for kids with learning difficulties, mental health, dyslexia etc which means in one form entry schools these kids just get ignored and have to go through the mainstream education which is also disruptive for other kids.
Exactly ! So by allowing schools like St Lukes to remember big, this is actually making the small schools smaller and the popular schools are depriving the small schools of funding! As a city we need to work towards all schools being equal! Not some schools lapping up all the funding, whilst other schools struggle, due to lack of funding …as all the kids are in the ‘popular’ schools. The popular schools need to help the small schools out here. We need to aim for a city where there aren’t ‘popular’ schools and ‘struggling due to low pupil numbers and thus limited funding’ schools. Come on St Lukes, think of the schools who can’t employ the support staff they need !
No. we need kids to get the best education possible and not just save half empty schools and sacrifice children’s education in doing so. It doesn’t matter in which school (providing it has a good Oftsed rating) but evidence shows that having more form entries typically delivers this.
So, if it was up to you , then more than half of the primary schools in the city would have to close down. 60 per cent of primary schools in our city are in deficit ,as they don’t have the pupils numbers to be funded properly. This means that many kids in our city are attending schools that don’t have enough funding for enough support staff. So we can either , close all the half empty schools and leave lots of children having to travel miles to primary schools (and these half empty schools are usually in the lowest income areas by the way), or we can see the big popular school reduce a class and then this will help fill the empty spaces in those schools that are struggling to pay for support staff. I know which option i would choose!