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Top schools told: Make space for more pupils
Dominic Hayes, Education Correspondent12 Jun 2008
Popular schools are to be forced to expand under moves to make it easier for parents to gain admission for their children.
Schools minister Jim Knight today unveiled a package of reforms to the national admissions code aimed at making the process less of a desperate race for hundreds of thousands of families each year.
Mr Knight said that rules preventing over-subscribed schools from adding new classes of up to 30 children at short notice would be relaxed.
"The bottom line is that parents should choose schools, not schools choose parents," he claimed, although this statement is likely to ring hollow with many London families who have tried and failed to get their children into good local schools.
The Government's move comes after this year's "unprecedented" surge in applications in Kingston, which left more than 200 four- and five-year-olds in danger of having no primary school to go to this autumn.
This month, Kingston council announced that seven of its primary schools would take up to 30 pupils more than their previously published maximums in order to ease a crisis in the supply of places, which parents said the authority should have been able to predict.
Other measures in the reform package include:
• Permission for faith schools to demand that parents sign a form saying they will support the school's "ethos".
• An explicit ban on schools demanding cash donations or for parents to give up their time to help out as a condition of entry, following a crackdown on schools in Barnet that were flouting this section of the code.
• Giving all parents the right to apply for at least three primary schools - currently some authorities do not allow more than a single application.
• Making local authorities responsible for co-ordinating primary as well as secondary school admissions.
• Requiring all councils to publish prospectuses showing how many applications each school received for its places the previous year, so parents can better gauge their chances of getting into one of their preferences.
Mr Knight said: "I am concerned that many parents find admissions far too complicated. Applying to a school shouldn't be an overly stressful, bureaucratic and opaque process."
