Brighton & Hove City Council has been awarded the prestigious Sutton Trust Fair School Admissions Gold Award for the second consecutive year.
This is the highest level of recognition given to local councils, multi-academy trusts and schools that have made significant changes to their school admissions policies to ensure all pupils have fair access to education, regardless of socio-economic background.
The Sutton Trust is an educational charity that aims to improve social mobility and address educational disadvantage across the UK.
Councillor Jacob Taylor, Deputy Leader of the Council, said: “We’re thrilled that the Sutton Trust have once again recognised our work on school admissions and efforts to tackle inequality, create greater equity of opportunity and improve educational outcomes.
“For this school year, we’ve introduced a number of new policies to create a fairer school system with more choice for families and enable us to build a better future for children and young people in Brighton & Hove.
“Following the changes to our secondary school admission arrangements, 83.5% of families received an offer for their first preference school in 2026 – an increase on last year, when 79.7% of families were offered their first preference.
“We’ve also recently seen a changing picture of preferences, with many families within the city’s central dual-catchment areas choosing BACA, Longhill, Patcham and PACA as a first preference.”
Some catchment areas of Brighton & Hove include one secondary school, while others include 2 schools. This means that young people in different areas have unequal options in terms of accessing secondary education within the city.
The council introduced an open admissions criterion that reserves up to 5% of places in each of the city’s community secondary schools for pupils who live in single-school catchment areas. This aims to create more equity of access to education to pupils across the city.
The council was also one of the first local authorities in the country to introduce a policy giving pupils eligible for free school meals priority when applying for secondary school, up to the city average (30% for 2025). This policy aims to improve educational inequality across the city.
