Craft Activity to make the Secondary School Admission Process more Accessible to Parents/Carers of Year 6 children

This relates to the secondary school admissions application forms.

Postcards will be sent to your school, showing the local high school open evening dates and times, to give to the children when the secondary school admissions application form is given out. It is hoped that the postcards will form part of a craft activity/session.

The Transition to Secondary School Officer (a.k.a. Choice Adviser) role was created by the DCSF to encourage parents/carers, who face barriers to accessing the secondary admissions process, to fill in and return their secondary admissions application forms on time, thus giving themselves the same chance as any other Norfolk parent/carer to get a preferred school.

To this end, various pilot projects have been set up around the county and we decided to trial a postcard system in Norwich. Recently I worked with some local Year 5 and Year 6 children to identify various designs that would appeal to other children their age to add to a postcard, and to help with the wording on the postcard. On the postcard is information about the open evenings of the 5 local high schools and next to these are tick boxes. Children will choose their postcard, from the 6 designs, and tick the box next to the high school open evenings they would like to attend. They may wish to attend only one, because their friends are going there, but children should take this postcard home and discuss their choice(s) with their parents/carers and ask to go to the open evenings ticked. Parents/carers may wish to go to more open evenings than the child has ticked, of course, and I would encourage any parent/carer to do this to get a real ‘feel’ of each school. This process will hopefully increase the likelihood of parents/carers facing barriers to the admissions process of attending the schools and making a real preference. NB These postcards will be put in the schools post on 14 September 2007 and should be given out and completed on the day the secondary admissions application forms go home.

Both myself and a colleague from the admissions team will be present at the open evenings for Blyth Jex, CNS, Earlham High and the Hewett High schools, so children can introduce themselves to me and play a game whilst their parent/carer is talking to my colleague. Parents/carers who have decided which 3 high schools to put as preferences on the admissions form can fill the form in at the open evening.

NB the secondary admissions form can be filled in from 25 September and should be returned by 14 November 2007.

Also, I am looking for professionals to comment confidentially on the secondary school admissions process as a whole, so that I can feed this back to the Head of Admissions, to make the whole process more accessible. If you have any queries/comments regarding any of the above, please contact me - Wendy Bradnam, Transition to Secondary School Officer at Norfolk Parent Partnership, Woodside Road, Norwich NR7 9QL, (01603)704070 or (07747) 757540.