Letter for Coombe Road parents to send out to Councillors etc...

To make your lives easy, here's the letter that Coombe Road School sent to you to use as a for your own complaints. You could also use it to help you to write your own personal letter.

Copy and paste the following letter into a document on your wordprocessor, add your address at the top and a signature at the bottom, and you can send it to one of the people on the "Who to Contact" sheet - the same list is found here on the blog.


The Letter

Dear

As a parent of a child at Coombe Road School, I would like to express my total opposition to the proposed new secondary admissions procedures. By placing our area in the catchment area for Falmer and Patcham schools, we are effectively being denied a choice. This lack of choice will be diminished still further if the amendment tabled by the Patcham parents leads to Falmer becoming a single catchment area.

The working group appears to have failed in all of the criteria it set itself:

• We have no access to our preferred school unless it happens to be Falmer (or maybe Patcham), currently two of the worst performing schools in Brighton & Hove;
• Our travelling distances will not be improved, as neither Falmer or Patcham schools are nearer to our area;
• Coombe Road currently fosters, and would want to continue to foster, links to many schools, but this will be cut down to two, or even one;
• Parental preference will only be met if we prefer to send our children to the least well-performing school(s). Any preference to send them to a successful secondary would only be considered in the virtually unheard of event of Dorothy Stringer or Varndean being undersubscribed;
• Year Six children will not have increased opportunities to transfer with friends from primary school. On the contrary, any families who are able will begin the process of moving to 'a better catchment area' not only splitting friends, but leading to the breakdown of the local community, and negative impact on the primary schools within the Falmer catchment area;
• The final point that this proposal will lead to a better balance in the spread of children from deprived wards would be laughable if it were not so offensive. The two successful Brighton secondaries have not only been incomprehensibly put in the same catchment area, but will be served by a carefully drawn catchment consisting of virtually all the affluent and middle-class areas of Brighton. On the other hand, Falmer will be served by only the less affluent areas of the city. A sprinkling of children on free school meals have been added all round, in a superficial attempt to make this seem fair.

All children should have the right to be educated at a good secondary school, and parents should have the right to choose where their children are educated. These new proposals deny any meaningful choice to large areas of the city and will increase the social divisions of the current admissions system. Children living in the BN2 4 area of the city will be severely disadvantaged by these proposals, and for this reason, we urge you to reconsider them.

Yours sincerely,