A CONSULTATION on school places in Leigh has been launched in order to try and overcome many of the issues facing parents trying to get their children into their first-choice options.

The informal consultation to gauge residents’ views will take place over the summer and into the September term where two initial options to deal with the challenges currently faced will be presented online and at interactive sessions.

This will be followed by a formal public consultation on one option that will take place at some point between October and January 31, 2018. The new arrangements will be brought into place for reception pupils starting in September 2019.

The first proposal is a reduction of catchment areas for six schools, enlargement for two schools and small changes to one other school.

The second is that six schools have their catchment areas removed and that these catchments are replaced with a shared priority area. They are West Leigh Schools, Leigh North Street Primary School, Chalkwell Hall Schools and Darlinghurst School .

Changes to oversubscription criteria which prioritises admissions to schools are also being considered, including prioritising all siblings before pupils that live in the proposed catchment or priority area. The consultation is necessary because evidence shows that if the council does nothing, that by September 2019, and based on birth data alone, 63 children in total would be unable to get a place across the area - 37 at Chalkwell Hall schools , 19 at Leigh North Street and seven at the West Leigh schools, despite living in that catchment area.

James Courtenay, councillor responsible for children and learning, said: “Although living in a catchment area can never guarantee a school place, they must give parents a reasonable chance to get their child into the catchment school. If they don’t there is little point to catchment areas.

“Where this is happening year on year, alternative options should be looked at and doing nothing is simply not an option as we are at the stage where our admission arrangements for the Leigh area could be considered unfair by the national adjudicator and challenged locally.

“Allocations to the Leigh schools have been varied and up to 2017 most schools have been able to accommodate all pupils applying from the catchment area, and in years where this has not been possible it has been for one-off reasons.

“However, from 2019 onwards, the births in West Leigh Infants School, Leigh North Street Primary School and Chalkwell Hall Infants School areas all exceed the number of available catchment places.”

Visit southend.gov.uk/schoolcatchmentresponse for more information.