Call for urgent inquiry into schools admissions system

Campaigners have today called for an urgent inquiry into the schools admission system that they say is “long overdue.”The Comprehensive Future campaign group says that local authorities now have little say on how pupils are admitted to schools in their area because more than 70 per cent of schools, including academies and faith schools, now act as their own admission authorities.The group today called on the Commons Education Select Committee to stage the inquiry, stating: “When Theresa May came to power in 2017, she promised to review our increasingly complex and fragmented schools admission system. Such an inquiry is long overdue following significant changes to our school landscape over the last decade.” In the latest annual report of the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, published in January, chief adjudicator Shan Scott repeated concerns that admissions are becoming harder to police and said there were "less and less justifiable reasons" from schools turning away pupils with special needs.She also said she was “very concerned” that some local authorities reported difficulty in establishing whether a child had or had not been previously looked after (which should give them priority admissions) and said the proportion of children eligible for the pupil premium securing places at grammar schools had “not increased in the ways hoped for”.