Fair admissions in action
Trinity Multi Academy Trust is a multi-award winning trust with 11 schools including 6 secondary schools. In 2023 they were awarded ‘Medium MAT of the Year’ at the National MAT Awards and they are also a ‘World Class MAT’. Trinity MAT supports high numbers of children eligible for Free School Meals and is dedicated to continuing to do so. They are the proud recipients of our first Gold Fair School Admissions Award for a Multi Academy Trust and we wanted to share their thoughts on how they ensure fair access to their school:
“At the heart of our educational mission, we have always believed strongly that a school’s cohort should reflect its local community. This is even more important to us as we predominantly work in areas of high deprivation, where the chance to attend an outstanding local school is imperative to transforming the life chances of the young people.
“We have a strong belief that, if our practice is transformational and serves the needs of the most vulnerable, then it should be shared as widely as possible. As well as our admissions practices, this this is also the case for things such as our teaching and learning strategies, pastoral systems and so on. Our schools span five local authorities; we deemed it important that our inclusive admissions philosophy did too.
“In order to ensure our admissions policies were fair and socially inclusive we introduced fair banding, which ensures that the cohort of students admitted matches exactly the profile of the students that apply to the school. We spend a lot of time ensuring that there are no misconceptions about the fair banding assessment so that parents know that their child cannot ‘pass or fail’ and that there are no benefits to tutoring to attempt to be assigned to a higher band. We also offer to administer the assessment in all local primary schools to maximise inclusivity.
“We differ in our approach to fair banding to many other schools by matching the size of our ability bands to the overall ability of the cohort which applied rather than having equally sized ability bands. This is important to our context as we serve disadvantaged areas, and we want to ensure that our school truly represents our most local community. We complement this with our oversubscription criteria, which crucially prioritise distance from the school, thereby guaranteeing that local children benefit from our practice.
“The effect of this has been profound; sign up has been significant, relations with local primaries cemented and – the best part of all – average distance to the school has shortened and local children are hugely benefitting from a fairer admissions policy that has their interests at heart.”