Asked by: Matthew Pennycook (Labour - Greenwich and Woolwich)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will (a) issue new guidance and (b) amend the school admissions code to give parents of multiple birth children the right to insist their children are not split up across different schools or classes within the same school.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The School Admissions Code already allows schools to admit multiple birth siblings as exceptions to the infant class size limit so that these children can be educated at the same school.
Once children have been admitted to school, it is for individual schools to make decisions about matters of internal organisation of classes, including how children should be split between classes in a year group with two or more forms. We would expect schools to take into account the views of parents in making such decisions.