Agenda item

Report of the Director of Children's Services. Cabinet Member for Children, Schools, and Families.

To agree the proposed arrangements for admission to community nursery classes, primary, junior and secondary schools, to St Aidan’s Voluntary Controlled School, and for sixth form admission for the year 2025/26, including proposals to reduce the published admission number (PAN) for several primary schools can go out for consultation.

The Cabinet Member for Children, Schools, and Families introduced the report, which sought Cabinet agreement to consult on the school admission arrangements for entry into school in the academic year for 2025/26 for Haringey’s community and voluntary controlled (VC), nursery, infant, junior, primary, secondary and sixth form settings.

The Cabinet noted that for 2024/25 there were no proposed alterations to the oversubscription criteria or Pan London co-ordinated admission schemes for Haringey primary, junior and secondary community, and VC schools for 2025/26.

This proposed consultation followed on from agreement by Cabinet in February 2023 to reduce the planned admission number for 8 primary schools from September 2024. Falling rolls due to lower birth rates and out of borough -migration rate had demanded changes to PAN in recent years.

In response to questions from Cllr das Neves and Cllr Cawley-Harrison, the following information was provided:

-       The issue around lower birth rates were an ongoing concern and Haringey was not the only borough to be affected. This had become a wider issue and was being discussed across many London boroughs as it had an impact on school budgets, finance, and sustainability.

-       Some of the key factors to the falling birth rates included migration, cost of living crisis and Brexit.

-       The number of students attending school in future years was projected to continue falling and there would be a possibility to reduce PAN number in future years. In terms of engaging with other schools to tackle this issue, there were a series of local in-person workshops to discuss school place planning and the wider education strategy.

-       The priority was to ensure sustainability of existing primary school offers in Haringey. As part of the strategic long-term planning, 2 Head Teachers from each clusters across Haringey had been asked to be part of an Education Strategy Board.

RESOLVED

1.    To agree to consult on the proposed admission arrangements, including the co-ordinated schemes for admission of children to schools for the academic year 2025/26.

2.    To agree to consult on the proposed fair access protocol^[1] which, if agreed at Cabinet in February 2024, would be come into force from 1 March 2024;

3.    To agree to consult with stakeholders on the proposal to reduce the PANs by 1fE at several primary schools across Haringey’s primary school estate (see table 1 at para. 5.12 for the list of affected schools).

4.    To note that following the consultation, a report will be prepared summarising the representations received and a decision on the final admission arrangements for 2025/26 will be taken by Cabinet in February 2024.

Reasons for decision

In common with many London authorities, Haringey has experienced a decrease in demand for reception school places for several years. This is due, in part, to the turbulence brought about by Covid-19 and Brexit. However, the decrease in applications is likely to reflect a wider set of factors at play that have been impacting demand for primary reception places for the past few years.

This has contributed to a higher than necessary number of reception places in some of Haringey’s educational planning areas where supply is predicted to outstrip demand. This report sets out our continued response to the change in demand for reception places in the borough and the consultation process we are asking to begin will gather views on an adjustment to our planned admission numbers for several schools. We will report back to Cabinet on this consultation and seek final agreement in February 2024.

Alternative options considered

We are not proposing a change to the oversubscription criteria for our community and VC schools for 2025/26. Whilst there are other ways admission arrangements can influence the allocation of school places set out in the Code (e.g., designated catchment areas, identified feeder schools or giving priority in our oversubscription criteria to children eligible for the early years premium/ pupil premium) no alternative option is being considered at the time of writing this report.

Although other London authorities (e.g. Camden and Hackney) have taken radical measures to address surplus capacity at primary level (school closures / amalgamations) this is not currently under consideration in Haringey. We are keen to maintain the mix and spread of all of our existing primary schools so that parents and carers have the optimum choice of school type and location.

Our overarching aim is to assist schools in helping to enshrine sustainability and to introduce greater flexibility within our school estate to respond to the increasing rate of variation in population demand. PAN reduction is one of several solutions that schools can explore, and future sustainability can also be achieved through other strengthening partnership e.g. soft/hard federations and memorandums of understanding between schools.