An academy has been told it cannot ban Year 7 pupils for failing to turn up on the first day of the school year.

Leeds City Council complained to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator (OSA) about the admissions arrangements for the Rodillian Academy.

Next year, its Year 7 pupils are due to start school in the second week of July, compared to a September start date for all the other secondary schools in the city.

The OSA report, published this month, describes this as “a very unusual date for the first day of the academic year”.

It quotes Rodillian’s admissions policy as saying: “If a child fails to attend the start of term due to a holiday or chooses to remain at their primary school then they risk losing their place at the academy.”

A note to the policy is more strongly worded, saying those that do not have permission to start late “will lose their place at the academy”, although the school told the OSA this was an oversight, and should match the wording of the admissions policy itself.

The council told the OSA: “We believe [the policy] is not possible within the law and therefore should not be included in the admissions policy.”

It argued that the Schools Admissions Code, which schools legally have to follow, only allows schools to withdraw places if they were offered in error, obtained fraudulently, or the parents had not responded to the offer of a place within a reasonable period.

The school denied it breached the admissions code, and the report says that “because the school’s term dates are so different to those of other schools, it considers it is essential that the start of term date is drawn to the attention of parents”.

Schools adjudicator Marisa Vallely wrote: “I agree with the central point made by the LA, namely that admission arrangements stating that a school will take action that it cannot legally take do not conform to the Code.

“Such arrangements would be factually incorrect and misleading.”

She said the school’s admission arrangements make “false or incorrect statements”, and ordered it to change them within two months.