Chamber Patrons
Trust’s policy rethink could prioritise disadvantaged
King Edward VI Academy Trust Birmingham has proposed changes to its admissions policies, in order to give more priority to disadvantaged city children. The trust has proposed priority of
places for local children, by creating new catchment areas. Currently admission criteria takes no
account of where an applicant lives. Under the new proposed changes, priority will be given to children who achieve a higher score in the school’s admission test and who live in the catchment area of one of the local selective schools. Remaining places will
then be made available to those with lower scores and/or living further away. All children must
achieve the standard qualifying score in order to be admitted to
Policy change: Heath Monk
any of the selective schools.
The proposed changes, if approved,
will affect admission from September 2020 at the following schools: • King Edward VI Aston School • King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Boys
• King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls
• King Edward VI Five Ways School • King Edward VI Handsworth Grammar School for Boys
• King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls Admission to all six schools are free,
with around 6,000 children a year taking entrance tests. Heath Monk, executive director, said:
“We want to enable more Birmingham children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to be able to attend their local King Edward VI grammar school. “The changes that we are proposing
will enable this, by creating priority catchment areas and by setting consistent entry thresholds across our family of grammar schools.”
Project hailed as a big breakthrough
A revolutionary project by Aston University experts has been named as one of the UK’s 100 “best breakthroughs” for its significant impact on everyday lives. Professor Nick Doran and his
team from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were named in the UK’s Best Breakthroughs list of the last century for pioneering work in long distance optical communications. The project looked at ways in
which the properties of light could be exploited to transmit vast amounts of data for thousands of kilometres through an optic fibre cable without information being lost along the way. The research led to the creation
of a system which is now used worldwide to stream films to TVs, transfer financial, business or medical information between computers over long distances and track the flows of money. Andrew Ellis, professor of optical
communications, said: “The ongoing research into optical communications is now more important than ever in order to mitigate a capacity crunch resulting from the continuously growing demand to transmit larger amounts of data.”
February 2019 CHAMBERLINK 37
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