CSIE has responded to the Department for Education’s consultation on Changes to the School Admissions Code. CSIE’s main response to this consultation was included in the response from the collective voice of the Special Educational Consortium. In its additional submission CSIE drew particular attention to the following two issues:

1. a) Some schools continue to undermine equal opportunities by discouraging parents of disabled children from applying for a place in that school. To support this claim, our submission referred to the earlier report from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner “It might be best if you looked elsewhere: An investigation into the schools admission process”.
2. b) The proposed new Code refers to “vulnerable” children, without clearly defining who they are, and claiming that they are “hard to place”. In its submission, CSIE pointed out that some disabled children may currently be hard to place because schools have not yet fully developed capacity to respond to the full diversity of children’s needs. If the DfE were to support schools to develop such capacity, as is required by the Equality Act 2010, the SEND Code of Practice, the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, then schools would be better prepared to include all children and no group of children would be considered “hard to place”.