ePetition - West Hove catchment area changes - Keep Our Community Together

1. The proposed changes will have a serious and detrimental impact on the wider community. The proposal to move residents living between Boundary Road (Hove) and Coleman Avenue into the Portslade Aldridge Community Academy (PACA) catchment area will forcibly split friendship groups established at Hove Junior school. Approximately 30% of Hove Junior students will no longer have the same options as their class friends. This will not only create unnecessary stress and anxiety for the children directly affected, but also change the fabric of a close-knit, established and family friendly community.

2. We believe that every child in Brighton & Hove should have access to quality local education and not be bussed across the city. Under these changes, the children affected would be unable to walk to school and would be faced with up to 5-mile return trip to school at peak hours in our already congested city. With only a small number of children affected, their safety, their ability to participate in activities out of school hours, and their ability to engage with the local community around the school will be compromised by this extensive commute.

3. We acknowledge that there is a need to relieve pressure on numbers on current schools but the proposed changes set a precedent that could have a negative impact for all parents across Brighton and Hove. The two principles that received the greatest support in the Council’s 2016 consultation on catchment areas were minimising pupil’s journeys to school and allowing children to move to secondary school with their friends. Both principles are abandoned in this proposal. With further population bulges predicted in the next few years, we believe this seemingly arbitrary setting of catchment areas sets a precedent that could open the way to even more dramatic changes. Parents will no longer be able to argue on grounds of distance to school if the council decrees that their child should be sent to a school out of the city.

4. We request that catchment areas remain unchanged until a site and opening date for the proposed Brighton & Hove Academy is confirmed. We believe the proposed changes fail to take into account the possibility that the proposed Academy may open later than 2019, may not be located at the current preferred site or may fail to open at all. We argue that children in the area must remain in the current catchments until the situation of the new school is confirmed. If not, families with children coming up to secondary after this two-year period risk having their children schooled in different schools.

5. We believe the Council’s so-called “light touch, temporary” proposals create significant disparity in choice and outcome for children in Brighton & Hove, which is at best unfair, and at worst discriminatory. We contend that the proposals are not in the best interests of the children who live in the areas designated to move catchment.

This ePetition ran from 05/10/2017 to 13/12/2017 and has now finished.

950 people signed this ePetition.