School breaks admissions code in order to “make a point” about comprehensive education

A Suffolk academy has been ordered to change its admissions arrangements after they gave priority to pupils from two private schools by naming them as “feeder primaries”.

Benjamin Britten Academy of Music and Mathematics contravened the School Admissions Code when it listed Langley Preparatory School, Norwich, and The Old School, Henstead, as feeder schools, a report from the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) said.

Langley Prep costs more than £12,000 a year for day pupils and is an hour’s drive from Benjamin Britten Academy in Lowestoft, which is part of the Hartismere Family of Schools Multi-Academy Trust.

When contacted by Education Uncovered, the headteacher of Benjamin Britten, Jim McAtear, said they had named private schools as feeders to “make a point” about the quality of education a comprehensive could offer.

The school was launched in 2016 to replace its predecessor school, Benjamin Britten High School, which was in special measures with falling rolls.

He said: “Two years ago only 90 pupils chose to attend Benjamin Britten School. This year 260 joined the school in year seven. This is the largest single increase known in any Suffolk School.

“The school named private schools in its potential intake simply to make this point: that the education a comprehensive school offers can compete easily with that offered by fee paying schools. The school respects the adjudicator’s view but insists that the schooling we offer is as good as that provided by private schools.”

The school has now removed the private schools from its list of feeder primaries.

The OSA also criticised the academy’s nomination of nine other geographically distant feeder primaries, this time state-funded.

The school claimed it selected feeders on the basis that they “work closely with the academy in terms of transition arrangements such that this works effectively for the education of the children concerned rather than on a geographical basis.”

But this could not be the case, the report said, since only one pupil from all nine schools had actually transferred to the academy in September 2018.

“I do not understand how schools can be said to ‘work effectively’ over ‘transition arrangements’ when no pupils are transferring between them,” adjudicator Peter Goringe wrote in his July report.

He added that these nine schools were “located much closer to other secondary schools and parents are not choosing to seek places at Benjamin Britten Academy”.

There were no reasonable grounds, at least on the basis of the evidence the school had provided, for naming them as feeder schools, Mr Goringe wrote, ordering that the list of feeder primaries be revised.

The adjudicator allowed the academy to retain seven other feeder primaries – closer to the school - on the basis that their selection had been “reasonable”.

The adjudicator’s report related to arrangements for admission to Benjamin Britten in September 2019, although the school’s website has stated that the two private feeder schools were named in 2017-18 and 2018-19 as well.

It is unclear whether any children from the private schools applied to Benjamin Britten, with the report showing that none joined the school at the start of the 2018-19 academic year last month.

The findings come amid an ongoing debate about the use of nominated feeder schools to make admissions decisions.

Context

Multi-academy trusts have been criticised in the past for naming primaries within their group, regardless of proximity, leading to complaints that children living close to the academies were not being admitted.

In 2013, Sheffield City Council was criticised by the OSA after allowing schools to give blanket priority to local state school applicants to sixth forms, which discriminated against applicants from private schools.

*Suffolk County Council, which brought the objection to the OSA, told Education Uncovered it had nothing to add to the adjudicator’s report.

The headteachers of both Langley Prep and The Old School were contacted for comment.