Is this admission fraud? AIBU to report it?

I think my LA is more flexible, one of mine went to grammar school with a girl who took the exam in another country where her father's job had taken them for a year or maybe two. She came home that summer and started grammar school in the September. Not sure if there is a special rule for that.

If it was a super selective grammar school, then the list would be held in 'score order' rather than by distance, so her being elsewhere at the time of application wouldn't impact on her ranking for a place.

Weeks rent, not sure what weed rent would be.

Yes it does. Although I don't know if all authorities are the same. The parents clearly weren't trying to scam anything as if they were they'd have just paid another weed rent.

I just felt so sorry for the four year old was excited about getting her place like all her friends.

I think my LA is more flexible, one of mine went to grammar school with a girl who took the exam in another country where her father's job had taken them for a year or maybe two. She came home that summer and started grammar school in the September. Not sure if there is a special rule for that.

The Admission Appeals Code makes it clear that the question for the appeal panel is not whether the admission authority was right. It is whether their decision was ‘beyond the range of responses open to a reasonable decision maker’ or ‘a decision which is so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question could have arrived at it’. This is the same standard that is applied at judicial review and sets a very high bar for parents to get over. So offering evidence that the decision was wrong and the family really is living in the rented property and will continue to do so long term won't, in general, win an appeal.

There are no national statistics on why appeals are won or lost, so I can only go off cases in which I have been involved. Parents have only won in cases of alleged admissions fraud where the decision clearly doesn't stand up to scrutiny (e.g. an LA that tried to take places away from any family that moved after getting a place, arguing that this meant their application must have been fraudulent) or the LA has failed to make reasonable enquiries before making their decision. That doesn't necessarily mean asking the parents for an explanation but, for example, if the house is clearly uninhabitable, the appeal panel is likely to think that the LA should have checked the house was habitable before deciding to use it as the home address.

In a surprising number of cases, parents who try to use a rented property to get a school place actually get it on the basis of their real home address. However, the information available suggests that very few of those who miss out because the LA believes their application was fraudulent appeal against that decision. Around 1,000 children every year have their place taken away after they have started attending the school because the admission authority has concluded that their application was fraudulent or deliberately misleading. Appeals against these decisions are vanishingly rare. That suggests to me that LAs generally get it right.

@TheignT it is sad.

But it does, I think, support the general premise of the posters saying that LAs will stick to the letter of the admissions policies and not take into account "personal/subjective reasons" - no matter how strong or legitimate they are.

Which is why I don't think "rented house out to refugees who had nowhere else to go" would be a winning case.

Sometimes, a school may really want to admit a child but the rules - made in the interests of the reliability, repeatability and predictability of the system- prevent it.

This is obviously right, as otherwise it could be abused by heads admitting children they ‘like’ and avoiding those thad they don’t (I have been at the receiving end of an informal, pre-application version of this when looking at schools for an in-year transfer and it was horrible), but it can feel unfair.

That’s hard, especially as an appeal at 4 would be under class size rules - so the decision not to admit would have had to be unreasonable, which is a high bar - rather than under balance of prejudice, where the harm suffered by the child in not being admitted can be weighed against the harm suffered by the school in admitting over 30 children into 1 class.

I know one case that I thought was very sad but it involved a four year old. Her parents applied quite legitimately for a place at one of the two schools in their town. It was the school her friends were going to. Both schools were fine, distance not a big issue as this was a small town not a large city.

Between the application and announcement of places the couple separated, they were renting a house but couldn't afford it so mum got a flat nearby, not sure where dad went.

Mum moved on the Saturday and the cut off day for address was the following Monday. Little girl got a place and someone reported the change of address and she lost her place. The LA confirmed that if she'd moved a few days later she'd have kept the place.

So little four year old had dad leave, moved house and lost her school place with her friends. I thought that was so sad, followed the rules but not much compassion.

I've had four children go through grammar school and id say the objective test of whether the grammar school is the best place for that child won't be known for some time.

I can think of two heavily coached boys who got into grammar school and after five miserable years one left with very poor GCSE results, one left having failed all his GCSEs. It wasn't the best school for them, their self confidence was destroyed and it is very possible they'd have got better results at the local comp.

The system is very flawed.

@prh47bridge in your experience, where parents have had a school place denied on the basis of reasonable suspicion of deliberate or accidental admissions fraud, and then appealed, do they tend to win appeals on the basis of further evidence / reasons?

Or in general, is the original decision upheld?

I’m trying to get a view as to whether LAs often make the ‘wrong’ decision, or whether in reality their reasonable suspicions tend to be justified under further scrutiny.

I didn't say that did I. I said a grammar isn't always the best thing for a particular child.

Reading comprehension is dire on here.

And it is entirely sensible that policies are drawn up in such a way that they do not set out an exhaustive list of exactly what might be acceptable and unacceptable, as those wanting to play the system would then take that as an ‘instruction book’ as to how to sail just inside the rules.

Instead, they tend to state the general principles (eg a principle that addresses of convenience are not allowed) and a process that allows them to determine whether there is a reasonable belief that one has been used. As prh has said upthread, there is a known precedent for defining ‘reasonable / unreasonable’ in this type of case, and unreasonable has quite a high bar.

A rule being ‘arbitrary’ does not make it ‘unfair’.

A similar case might be faith rules for admission to faith schools, where an ‘arbitrary’ choice is made by the admissions authority as to what evidence they will accept - baptism; weekly attendance for 2 years; signed letter from priest etc, because there is no fair and repeatable way of assessing a person’s ‘genuine belief in that faith’.

The system needs to be repeatable and predictable, yes. Lines cannot be drawn differently every time on a whim. However, the decision to eg class short term rental while owning another home as fraud but moving into the catchment area and selling the previous home as not fraud is an ‘arbitrary’ decision (in the sense that the line could be drawn elsewhere) but is fair if is consistent and transparent and does not discriminate on the basis of a protected characteristic.

making the process fair and repeatable

it's not though is it? It's arbitrary, since there may be numerous legitimate reasons why people rent and own that have nothing to do with school admissions and anyway the rules rarely outright prohibit this (and for good reason).

It would be impossible for the LA to hold a hearing or panel on every case where the parents thought they had a good reason to put down a different address.

As has been said, if this LA does allow a rented address to be used in preference to a nearby owned property, provided that the rental contract is for at least (say) 12 months and that the owned property also has a rental contract on it for a similar time, then those are objective facts that can be evidenced and any worker in the education department would draw the same conclusion, making the process fair and repeatable.

If the LA’s only evidence was the hearsay word of a child, that would indeed be an issue.

In fact, they will use a whole range of ‘behind the scenes’ information that they already hold or request from other public bodies, and can request further information from the family.

The family can appeal for the school
place they wanted via the usual routes if they think the use of their permanent address is wrong and a place is not allocated.

Problematic that they don't even offer families a chance to explain/ argue their case!
Makes it all the worse that OP reported this based on partial hearsay from a child.

I think the point is, she probably won’t get to “argue” that case. The LA will ask for whatever evidences they need (council tax bills etc) and note that she has a one year (say) rental contract that started recently but is still the registered owner of a nearby home which was her address for years. If their policy is to use the address of an owned home, they will switch the address on the application to the owned home, after asking whether that house is still habitable or whatever they ask.

They may (unlikely) accept the statement that she was helping out relatives - but ultimately, it was her choice to do that in this way, rather than have them to stay in her house, lend them money or just not help them. It wasn’t fire, flood etc but a free choice. However, if they don’t, there’s not an opportunity for her to argue her case anywhere, the LA will just decide.

I am not sure continuing to use the word “illegal” is very helpful.

The neighbour has used a rental address for the application when she still owns a home in the vicinity. The LA will either consider that the rental address has been used correctly (unlikely) or will use the prior address.

As prh has stated, very rarely does using an address that the LA consider incorrect lead to criminal proceedings (if you read the link, the woman involved there actually falsified documents such as rental agreements, which has not happened here).

I think it would be clearer to use words like “not qualifying” or “disallowed” than illegal or crime. OP isn’t seeking for her neighbour to be prosecuted, but for the LA’s criteria to be applied to her application,

You are putting on them the interpretation you want, which is that LAs generally allow people to rent whilst owning a property and only sometimes rule it out.

No I'm not.

I'm simply pointing out that it's not nearly as simple as saying the fact that you rent a property while still owning a nearby property is automatically admissions fraud.

It isn't.

Every LA has a different policy. Some explicitly allow this and ask for evidence of a rental agreement etc.

Other , more strict areas , say that even renting out your previous property may not be sufficient. They say that renting while owning may be seen as a red flag for investigation, and is not usually allowed if the rental address is temporary (temporary often being suggested as implied by a short term rental agreement of less than 12 months). Even temporary addresses may be considered in extenuating circumstances- eg domestic violence, uninhabitable property etc.

I suspect that what happens in practice is that most people who do this in fact get away with it, either because it's a genuine move (for a range of possible reasons) or because nobody flags what they have done, and that only the most obvious cases (where someone has just short term rented a property , that they are not really living in at all, just to get in catchment) are investigated by the LA , hence always going the way that you mention.

Reporting may be fruitless anyway. She could argue her relatives being refugees and only on a year visa, probably with no previous rental references could have made it necessary for her to have helped them, so has a reasonable excuse to have moved into rental herself.

They may expect the application to have been at the rental for a set time.

I know in my country some schools say you have to have lived in a rental for so long before you apply to avoid these situations. If she hasn't done anything illegal though pretty pointless reporting her.

Can you give the references for these cases?

👏 prh