Primary School Appeal

[AnnabelleOC]

HELP!!!!! My husband is in the Armed Forces and we are moving back to the UK on a very short notice posting (1st August), we have done the schools admissions and our daughter has been accepted into Reception class at our first choice school, however we put our son (who would start year 3) down for the same school and he has been refused a place as the class is full. We are hoping that we might get him in on appeal based on the fact that he is disadvantaged due to the fact we had no option of applying when everyone else did and that he has a sibling at the school. Also we know that the max no. of pupils for the year is 64 (56+8 extra), we feel that these extra 8 alloted pupils have been allocated too early to give us a fair chance of getting in.

We also feel that due to having to move regularly it is very important that the children stay together seeing as they have to leave and make new friends every couple of years.

Lastly as my husband is away from home for extended periods we are in effect a one parent family a lot of the time.

Can anyone tell me if I have a good enough case for appeal, or if there is anything else i can add.

Thanks in advance

Get in touch with CES: Forces children qualify for special consideration under the Fair Access Protocol (FAP) which allows a school to admit an extra pupil. They should be able to help you with how to get this across to the Admissions people.

A lot of people are lone parents

What point in relation to MY thread and MY Appeal are you trying to make?

Thank you for your relevant information Edith.

Good luck with your appeal AnnabelleOC , ignore kilmuir's post, don't think she has a clue (must admit I don't either. As I understand it, HMF are given access to places above and beyond lone parents. Given you are not appealing on the basis of being a lone parent, ignore that comment.

But, to be fair, annabelle did mention being effectively a lone parent as if she was going to use it for her appeal.
And therefore kilmuir's observation is relevant - being a lone parent would not count as a reason for appealing.
Being HMF is relevant however.
Good luck.

Agh! I posted a long post just as MN crashed for the umpteenth time.

Haven't got time to rewrite it all but the gist was

The Fair Access Protocol is relevant here (it should be on the LEA's website). If your LEA has a parental choice adviser (or similar title), enlist their help in getting the LEA to look at your son's application under the FAP.

The FAP (as far as I know, I stand to be corrected) only applies to community schools. Is your daughter's school a community school? If it isn't, that may be why the LEA hasn't invoked the FAP to get your son admitted there (although my hunch is that the LEA have simply overlooked the FAP).

Under the FAP, the LEA judges which school is best able to admit the additional pupil - it won't necessarily be the school the parents choose, although I would expect the LEA to take due account of where a sibling had already been admitted, because it is usual to keep siblings together at primary level.

If you get nowhere with the FAP, the appeal will turn on the balance of prejudice (disadvantage) to your son in not being admitted and to the school and its existing pupils in admitting another pupil. The sorts of things you mention will be relevant except that parents' work or family situation is not usually taken into consideration. Saying that you are "kind of" a single parent will be tendentious - for all you know, the panel could be made up of three single parents - but you can rightly emphasise that service families face particular difficulties and that these are recognised under the FAP. If the LEA has failed to deliver on the FAP, you can point that out too.

Panel: I am wary of contradicting you, but there is specific provision to take parental employment into account when that employment is HMF.

Yes, Edith, that is why I say that parents' work is not usually taken into account and why I encourage the OP to point out that the FAP recognises that particular considerations apply to service families. We are not in disagreement here!

Just one example - Fair Access Protocol for Oxfordshire 1012/13

Sorry, i wasnt going to put in the bit about the lone parent , at the appeal but Surely the Military Covenant should be mentioned?

We were told they had to offer us a place but may not be at school we wanted. To be fair they had a place in year 1 and said they may be able to find a year 5 place which they did.
Good luck. Your son must be near top of waiting list with a sibling there already

As the school is full, i was told that if a place became available all the children would be assessed under normal criteria i.e children in care, special needs sibling straight line distance. The man said that being armed forces would not make a difference. Is this correct

Sorry, panelchair!

You need to speak to CES about what to say to the admissions man. Areas which do not often deal with HMF often do not know the special provisions. CES will be able to advise on what you need to say to remind (tell) them of these.

They get extra funding for armed forces children

AnnabelleOC - You need to ask the LEA whether they have looked at your application for your son in the light of the Fair Access Protocol. I have linked (as a random example) to Oxfordshire's and your own LEA's ought to be on its website. You need to quote it at them! The more you say about what has happened, the more I suspect that the LEA has overlooked the FAP and has overlooked the fact that, as a forces family, you do indeed get treated differently, because children of forces families moving between postings are one of the specified cases where a LEA can direct a school to admit an additional pupil even if the class is full. The LEA's insistence that being a forces family makes no difference is, quite simply, wrong.

I imagine you've already seen the CEAS website but they should be able to talk you through the process.

And, as I said before, this really ought to be sorted out without going to appeal.

Has the LEA offered your son a place in any other school? Or is he without anywhere to start school in September?

If you have to take this to appeal, the panel is likely to take a dim view of the LEA's intransigence and might well (I imagine) order the school to admit your son, on the grounds that the LEA's refusal of a place and refusal to look at the application in terms of the FAP is unreasonable - although they will also want to understand the numbers already in the year, as a notional figure of 56 with 8 'extra' is strange and classes of 32 are already large. Your case would in a sense be stronger if your son had no place at any school, but if the LEA offers a place for him in a different school you can highlight all the reasons why he would suffer prejudice by not being at school with his sister. In either scenario, you can argue that the FAP overrides the usual considerations of a class being full.

He has been offered a place at a pretty good school 4 miles from his sisters, however they have offered us a school that will take both of them, that in our opinion is totally unsuitable.

Ah, well then it gets more complicated, because the FAP means that you should be offered places in the school which in the LEA's judgement is the one best able to cope with taking the additional pupils. The FAP does not mean that parents get a completely free choice of school.

Again, it is worth confirming with the LEA whether or not they have made these offers under the terms of the FAP. If these offers have nothing to do with the FAP then (perhaps) the FAP may yield other offers but the LEA is unlikely to place your children in a school that is alreday full if there are spaces in other schools - the FAP is intended to manage those situations where all schools are full but the child needs a school place.

We just feel that we are disadvantaged, because we can't apply when everyone else did last September, meaning we do not have a fair and equal chance at getting into one of the good schools. When i applied 2 weeks ago all our choices were full, all that is left is a school that will always have spaces available, mainly because its results are well below average across the board.

I understand that but, as I said, the FAP isn't (as I understand it) intended to help where places are available but parents don't much like the schools where they're available. Anyway, it's still far from clear to me whether the LEA has taken account of the FAP or is just treating you as a run of the mill late application - this merits further investigation on your part.

I understand that you want your children to go to a good school but infant class size limits are written into legislation. If there is nothing more on offer via the FAP, then an appeal for the Y3 place for your son - which won't be bound by the ICS limit - may be your best option.

"we feel that these extra 8 alloted pupils have been allocated too early to give us a fair chance of getting in"
Not quite sure what you mean by this. Too early? The LEA have to operate the system according to a certain timescale. They can't hold back places on the off-chance that someone else might turn up and want them. Or not. As, in fact, is the case for the school you've been allocated.

That is why you need CEAS (as panelmember rightly put the acronym I was groping for) advice.

You point about disadvantage is well made and the adverse impact on outcomes for Forces families is acknowledged in the Military Covenant. HMF families should not be treated the same as any new arrival, and consideration should be made for steps to ameliorate the known problems. The whole purpose of the policy is to avoid children being shunted from one under performing school to another, and acknowledges there is nothing at all that parents can do about their move timings, or frequency, or the location of their housing.

If it is not too personal, would you be kind and post here idc what CEAS advise?

I agree with Clam here. The school admissions process happens to a timetable. It has to, because parents need to know where their child will be going to school and schools need to know who is being admitted. Whatever the allocation date, there will always be someone who feels it's too early or too late to suit them.

LEAs and schools do no deliberately keep places empty in case there are late applicants, whether they are forces families or anyone else. The FAP tries to ensure that certain groups - including armed services' children - are not left without a place because every school is full, but, beyond that, I'm not sure what LEAs and schools could reasonably do without disadvantaging other children.

Here is a useful AFF page, and one to the 2009 guide to Service Children in State Schools handbook, but I think there's been an update since then. I'll post it if I find it.