admissions nightmare, advice VERY gratefully received

[rodformyownback]

Long post but please bear with me - I don't want to miss out pertinent details that could make a difference to any advice you may have.

My DS is due to start school this September.
Last September my DH submitted an online application to the LEA. A couple of weeks ago he found out by accident at a governor's meeting that ds1 is not on the roll for next September. On contacting the LEA he was told that he had provided the incorrect date of birth - 10 for the month instead of 01 - and that ds1's application had therefore been taken to be for the following year.

I find it difficult to believe that dh could have made this mistake as if you look at the online form, the month of birth is selected from a drop-down list of January, February etc, however as it is an automated system I don't know how else this could have happened.

DH was told the day after he discovered this that ds's application would be considered by 7th May and that there was no need to appeal or submit a fresh application. However when he phoned the LA yesterday he was told that ds is being considered as a late application. We are so worried as so far as we can see, a late in-catchment application is about the only way in which in these circumstances our ds could e refused a place in the catchment.

The school is a village CofE primary. We are not churgoers, but my dh is a governor at the school. To our knowledge 61 places have been offered for this year group, 3 of these to out of catchment children with siblings at the school. At least 2 other out of catchment siblings I know of have not been offered a place and at least 1 of these is appealing. We have a huge number of personal reasons to want our ds to be at our local school but I'm not sure these are relevant at this stage so won't go into these now.

We don't think that we should be treated as a late application as whether there was an error on our application or not, we submitted it in good faith on time and did not have the opportunity to rectify the details until now. The email response we received to the online application did not confirm the details we had provided or the year of entry.

I understand that late applications are a grey area from other threads. I guess my questions are as follows:

• Do we have a leg to stand on in maintaining that our application is not "late"?
• What are the precedents to our case?
• If our application must be treated as "late", what should we be doing at this stage to ensure he gets a place?

I've tried to stick to the facts here but I am really desperate and devastated at the thought that our ds might not be able to go to our local school. I would be very, very grateful for any advice. thanks

I am surprised that you say 61 places have been offered in Reception. Given infant class size regulations that seems unlikely but not entirely impossible. I would normally expect 60 offers.

Late applications are not really a grey area. They are dealt with after all the on time applications, which means they only get a place at one of their preferred schools if there are still places available after all the on time applicants have been awarded places.

You will almost certainly have to appeal for a place at this school. If the admission number is 60 (which seems likely from your post) this will be an infant class size appeal. To win you would have to show that the LA or school has made a mistake or acted unreasonably.

In this case I would argue that the LA has acted unreasonably. Applications for admission to Reception next year are not yet open. I therefore believe they should have some error checking on the online application form so that it won't let parents submit the application unless the date of birth shows that the child is due for admission to Reception. Failing that, I believe they should have contacted you to check once they spotted the error. I would argue that simply discarding the application without saying anything to you at all is unreasonable.

I cannot guarantee that an appeal panel will agree but it is worth a try. If you do lose an appeal I would refer this case to the Local Government Ombudsman.

What is the school's admission criteria? As far as I am aware, to make the point that decision to admit was unreasonable, you need to be sure that if the application had gone in completely correctly (or if the LEA had "behaved reasonably" and thought to check with you, as prh47bridge says), you would have be given a place. Do you think this is the case? (for example, if the admission criteria gives preference to churchgoers and can fill all its places with them, then you wouldn't have got a place anyway)

Yes, PatriciaHolm is correct. You need to show that your son would have been admitted if the application had been processed as an on time application with the correct date of birth. If in catchment children are higher priority than out of catchment siblings the fact that some out of catchment siblings have been admitted suggests that your son would have got a place.

In terms of precedents, you could refer to Local Government Ombudsman case 04/A/1909. In this case the child attended an infants school and applied for transfer to the associated junior school. The LA refused admission on the grounds that the parents had failed to provide proof of residence with their application and had also failed to respond to a reminder. The parents maintained that they had submitted the required proof with their original application and denied receiving any reminder. The LGO decided that, as the missing proof of residence made the difference between getting a place and not getting one, the LA should have rung the parents. He said this was an appropriate customer care approach and would be cost effective in avoiding having to deal with complaints.

This case is not identical. Furthermore it dates from 2004 and the rules have changed a lot since then so there is no guarantee this precedent applies. It is, however, worth mentioning to the LA and, if it goes to appeal, bringing it up there as it helps to suggest that the LA was unreasonable in simply ignoring your application.

Turning to the online form, it is possible that they used month numbers rather than names at the time your husband submitted your application. If that was the case, typing 1 may have resulted in the form coming up with 10 if the entry for January was 01 rather than just 1. It is also, of course, possible that there is (or was) a fault on the form and all January births were recorded as October. That would only take a simple typo in the HTML for the form. If the form was faulty I would expect to find other parents of January-born children in the same situation.

Sorry - in the first paragraph I should have said "if in catchment non-church going children are higher priority than out of catchment church going siblings the fact that some out of catchment siblings have been admitted suggest your son would have got a place."

Thanks for your responses.
Our LA will accept applications at any time so admissions are already open for coming years (to check out the online form, I applied again for ds2 who was born in 2010). However the confirmation email did not include any information that we had put into the application, or the anticipated year of entry to the school.

The admissions criteria go catchment, then siblings, then church. If the application had gone in completely correctly then we would definitely have been offered a place before the 3 out-of-catchment siblings. The AN is 60 but 61 places have definitely been offered - my dh has seen it in writing and it has been discussed at the governors meeting.

I don't think that the LA is being reasonable in treating us as a late application. Any thoughts?

I have contacted our local councillor and drafted a letter to the head of admissions. Got everything crossed!

Also fwiw other primaries in the borough are oversubscribed, which is probably why 61 places have been offered. The school is going to have to expand in the next year or two because 150 new homes are being built in the village.

Can you identify the LA? Feel free to PM me if you don't want to post it publicly.

It is normal for admissions to be open for in-year applications all the time but they should not, in my view, be accepting applications for admission to Reception in 2013 yet. They will only just have determined their admission arrangements for next year and we are now starting the period in which objections can be lodged with the Schools Adjudicator. They shouldn't really accept applications until that is over and their prospectus is available. Most LAs don't accept applications before September.

I have already given my view that you can argue the LA has acted unreasonably in the way they have dealt with your application. If they had contacted you to check the date of birth they could have corrected your details and processed it as an on time application.

If you are in England I would not expect them to offer 61 places just because there is a shortage of places. A bulge class would make sense but not a single pupil. Unless the additional pupil is in one of the classes of excepted pupil they will have to employ an additional teacher in order to comply with the law on infant class size.

Can't add much to what prh47bridge has said ...

BUT you mention that some out of catchment siblings have got places and some haven't. You also imply (by mentioning ds2) that you don't already have a child at the school - is that right? If so, a great deal hinges on where in-catchment not-church-attending not-siblings fit within the admissions criteria - are they above or below out-of-catchment siblings? If the admissions criteria go something like (say)

looked after children
siblings in catchment
siblings out of catchment
church members in catchment
church members out of catchment
others in catchment
others out of catchment

then you might not have got a place in any event because they ran out of spaces in a category above you.

I don't think you can argue about whether or not your application is late. The fact is that it is being considered after most places have been allocated - whether or not you call that late is really a matter of semantics.

Your best hope - outlined by prh47bridge - is to argue that your application wouldn't have been late if your LEA had more safeguards against submitting applications with the wrong DOB.

The fact that your husband is a governor at the school is another red herring. It gives you no extra priority for a place.

Agree with prh47bridge too that the 61st pupil is far more likely to be 'excepted' within the meaning of the admissions code than to be part of the LEA's strategy to increase overall capacity in its schools.

The 61 pupil has to be an excepted pupil and for there to be an excepted pupil there needs to have been a mistake made already to allow the admission authority (the school) to have offered the place. So the first question I would be asking is under what circumstances was this pupil admitted and does it have any bearing on your situation.
As PRH has said there is no way that the LA should be accepting applications now for next year, which actually does confirms that the LA common application form is flawed. What happens if you put the wrong year in, does it put you down for a school place in 10 years time, when the child has not even been borne at the time of application?

Not that this will be of any help to you in your appeal, but it may make your DH feel a bit better - on many online forms with a drop down menu it's set so that you can use the scroll button on your mouse to move down the list. This means that it's very easy to enter the wrong number if you choose a value from the list and then scroll down to the next question before the list closes - the chosen value will alter as you scroll, then that new value will be selected and the list closes when you click on the next bit of the form. But it's very easy to not notice, because you've moved down the page and the list may not even be on the screen anymore.

Yes I think the scroll button on the mouse may have been the culprit. DH did the application at his work at the time where all the computers had this kind of mouse.
Thanks so much everyone for your advice. PHR47 I will PM you the LA.
I am 100% sure that ds1 would have got a place had it not been for the error.
Re the LA being unreasonable in opening applications for future years early (and they definitely do this; I've now applied for ds2 to start in 2015!), is there any legislation/regulation/guidance around this?

On Tuesday I emailed and posted our letter to the head of admissions, and cc'd in our local councillor. I spoke to the councillor on the phone and he contacted the head of service in our support, and she emailed me saying she will look at the matter as soon as possible. I know that they are making decisions on appeals on 7th May so it's really important that we get this sorted this week before any free places are offered to out of catchment appeals.("Late" is not just a semantic point, far from it late applications are only considered after everyone else has been offered a place).

Thanks again for everyone's help.

Just a minor point; if there are free places, they should be allocated to those on waiting lists, and not kept for appeals. Appeals lead to extra children, not children using up unallocated spaces. If you are top of the waiting list and a space comes up tomorrow, it should be yours.

I will look at your PM later but just to confirm what PatriciaHolm has said, there is no such thing as a free place to be offered for out of catchment appeals. Any free places are filled automatically. Any successful appeals result in the child being admitted immediately even though the school is already full.

And actually I agree with PanelChair that "late" is a semantic point in this case. The fact is that they did not treat your application as late. They did not process it at all. You only found out when allocations had already been made. At that point, as all places at your preferred school had already been filled, the only option was to put you on the waiting list. It makes absolutely no difference to your position on that list whether you applied on time or not. So they may now regard your application as late but it has no effect on anything.

Your argument with the LA is not about whether they should have treated your application as on time. It is about whether they should have contacted you, corrected the date of birth and processed it.

I have now looked at your PM!

The basic point is that they can't sensibly start accepting applications until the admission arrangements are finalised. The admission arrangements for next year could still change. If that requires them to gather additional information on the application form, for example, what do they do about any applications received before the change that don't have the required information? And if major changes are made parents who have already applied will have done so based on incorrect information. I don't think there is any legislation or code around this but I would argue that it is unreasonable for the LA to accept applications before the admission arrangements are finalised.

I've looked at their admissions booklet. It is very odd in that it gives a date on which you can start applying for transfer to Junior or Secondary schools but not for Primary schools.

You misunderstand me, I think. It is pointless trying to argue that your application should not be regarded as late, because it was/is being dealt with after the main run of applications and the LEA cannot turn back the clock to treat it alongside all the applications that were considered in the initial run.

As prh47bridge says, your argument is not about the lateness or not of your application, it's about the LEA not doing anything in response to what (you will argue) was a glaring error that should have rung an alarm bell and prompted them to contact you.

Yes I think I did misunderstand! got a bit stuck on the late thing. Got to run but I'll be back this aft to ask more questions if that's ok