School application from rented address - nothing council can do?

Our secondary school is very big on the school being a community and they believe the sibling policy feeds into that - families involved long term with the school due to multiple children are more likely to get involved and support the school. My DC enjoy being at the same school - not all teens suddenly want nothing to with their siblings.

I wish I had seen some of these posts when I was going through applications a couple of years back. DD was near the top on the waiting list on offers day but I know that a child below her (distance criteria) moved into rented accommodation between initial and 2nd round offers, went straight to the top of the list and was immediately offered a place. The child's family moved only a mile from their (owned) house which they rented out. They've since moved back home .
DD stayed at the top of the waiting list but didn't get an offer. She ended up at her 2nd choice school and finally got a place at the end of Yr7.

I did report what I knew to the council; the admissions staff told me that if the family had actually moved then this was legitimate and that the same option was open to me, provided that I moved even closer to the school then they did! I was pretty appalled, and very disappointed for DD but didn't have the emotional energy to appeal; I thought it better to put all my energy into being positive about our 2nd choice. I also thought that it would be impossible to collect the confidential data to prove that DD should have received a place.

I've since heard of at least 1 other family who temporarily rented next to this same school and I wish in retrospect that I had challenged the council at the time. It is basically a fraud and it is one which has a direct impact on other children.

Re uniform.
A) school in question doesn't have a uniform
B) lots of bits of uniform can't be shared between opp sex children
C) most secondary school uniform gets knackered
D) no secondary school has uniform for 7 years, only 5

So not sure that's really a justification for sibling policy at secondary...

There are some genuine justifications I'm sure, just not sure if they outweigh the disadvantages.

maryso I 'm not that bothered really and there is definitely nothing wrong with benefitted from the sibling rule as it was written. I was just pointing out that the rule itself is an interesting way to approach distribution of places when you think of it.

And I fully agree with you on family being one of the largest determinant of pupil performance. This is why all this is a self-reinforcing process in the end (schools perceived to be worth the extra effort to get into attract hands-on, pro-active parents, whose kids have more favourable outcomes, which increases the perception those schools are worth the extra effort to get into)

how does one justify priority to little brother or sister of a 6th form student who in all likelihood is a 100% independent commuter at that point

Passing on uniform which over 7 years adds up to £££

how does one justify priority to little brother or sister of a 6th form student who in all likelihood is a 100% independent commuter at that point

Passing on uniform which over 7 years adds up to £££.

alej... sadly neither my nor your opinion matters that much on what constitutes 'making sense' policy-wise.

The school admissions code has not been contravened, and challenges have not been upheld. Therefore the local council has applied sound procedures legally and diligently. It has done its job of allocating school places and delivering a service paid for by central government.

Some of us are of the view there are no magic schools. The only magic is what the child can conjure when they are not blocked, and that's a function of their own learned behaviour mostly from their families.

You must work for a much richer council than me

I don't work for a council but I do know the stats. It may be, of course, that you live in an area where there is no problem with renting or where the LA isn't bothering to do anything about the problem beyond a few basic checks and a handful of investigations.

Do you mean to say a parent launches an appeal on the grounds that child x lives in a rented house

The appeal would be on the grounds that the Council was provided with evidence that child x applied from a false address and failed to investigate. It won't always succeed by any means but some appeal panels have been known to allow appeals where it is clear that the Council has simply ignored evidence of cheating. The panel is unlikely to get involved in figuring out whether or not child x really did use a false address.

What's up with sibling places anyway? They make sense for primary admissions given parental burden. But how does one justify priority to little brother or sister of a 6th form student who in all likelihood is a 100% independent commuter at that point

Paperm0ver

The word on the street is that it isn't that good a school anyway and people I know have opted for the other localish single sex over that one.

To my point above, it will be very interested to see future results vs catchment size, because my intuition is that at the margin, tighter criteria / more controls discourage those parents most likely to be very involved in their children education from attempting to temp-rent their way in. Which in turn means an intake marginally less obssessed with raw results and lower performance and the realisation that most of the added value of the school was in allowing a partially self-selecting intake.

On a sidenote, /that/ school a perfext example of why those people are not at all sticking it to the man. Fake addresses in the streets directly next to the street very likely obtaining places to the detriment of the nearby estates.

Objectively, schools are funded from national coffers, not local taxes. London densities and travel make for 'local' being a large area, especially at secondary. Local councils operate consistent admissions procedures. Whether they are 'fair' or 'moral' is not as simple as distance from home, especially in London. They need to be consistent, and the outcomes reasonable. They appear so, in Camden.

If CSFG had a significant number of pupils whose mothers tactically gave birth to sons exactly five academic years before a stream of daughters, and they were all replaced by 'deserving admission failures', it would become just like the schools the current admission failures are 'forced' to attend. Presumably not the lovely La SWAP lot with their sweeping grounds and superior facilities. The teachers, after all, are similar and move about all these schools.

A few instrumentalists would hardly dent the level of music in other schools. Their impact is far less than say somewhere like a London super-selective denting performance elsewhere. There are very few state schools to avoid in that part of London, and most people are happy enough where they are. Even in the fee-paying sector, most parents stick with where their child is happy, some after much more bruising rejections from either better performing schools or their prep telling them their DC would be better matched elsewhere. It is questionable anyway whether the CSFG ethos would suit competitive parents who fail in their mission. State school admissions procedures apply to all applicants, successful or not. If you didn't get in, that's because someone more suitable got there before you. Try the independent sector, there may be more flex there.

I am not sure what you mean by lost admissions appeals. Do you mean to say a parent launches an appeal on the grounds that child x lives in a rented house ?Surely the appeals panel wouldn't have any knowledge of that and indeed want to get into discussing the admission of another child (who might even have been a priority admission)

You must work for a much richer council than me prh ;-)

If you think councils have the resources or motivation to conduct the number or type of checks and investigations some people seem to be implying, you are way off the mark

If you think they don't it is you who is way off the mark.

Councillors are politicians. When faced with parents angry about others cheating the admissions system they will pressure the admissions team to do something about it. The admissions team won't like losing appeals due to an inadequate process nor will they be happy about negative publicity in the press showing that they are one of the worst councils in terms of policing admissions.

Yes, enforcement varies. All LAs carry out basic checks on applications (which may include checks against the information the council holds re property ownership) and will investigate at least some applications further when there is reason to suspect an issue.

It is not universally true but in general the councils with the biggest problem of parents renting to get into a good school are the ones most likely to take a proactive approach to investigations. As teacherwith2kids points out, it is pretty easy to identify the applications where an investigation is most likely to reveal an issue. Some LAs investigate 10% or more of applications. For others the percentage is lower. But every single LA in the country conducts detailed investigations on a proportion of applications. The number of investigations has gone up dramatically in the last few years as has the number of children having offers withdrawn.

No, CSG. Though much of the same hysteria applies to F, and people are def still renting flats in those mansion blocks on the crossroads specifically to get child no. 1 in, before moving back to East finchley or bounds green...

Agony, Paper, Thankgod and others, are you talking about Fortismere? That school is like a Midwich Cuckoos cult, are we not allowed to name it?!

Agony I think the school may use ability as a criteria for their music places as they were a selective school prior to a particular date-a date which I can't remember, sorry. I think this case went to a Admissions Ombudsman and was ok'd, although some slight tweaks to their admissions criteria were suggested, and made. I think it was the change about when children had to sit the banding test.

They've been comprehensive since the 1970s, cos I know quite a few people who went there. Back in the day you could get in from as far away as East Finchley and Islington, so lord knows how the admissions system actually worked - I think there was a bit of a 'm/c parents in the know' kind of thing going on back in the days of ILEA. Interesting that they've found a loophole to keep auditions as part of their selection.

The current insanity has just ramped up and up since the introduction of league tables. It's a really negative thing, because it encourages people to develop a mindset in which certain schools are deemed to be acceptable for the offspring of ambitious parents with the means to play the system, and all schools that aren't the favoured few are considered to be Knife Crime High.

I'm also v. cynical about the music place thing, as it means that certain schools cream off all the best instrumentalists, which has a knock-on effect on the general level of music in all the other schools in the area. It's interesting how many schools have quietly dropped the music criteria once they were no longer allowed to audition.

I'll be honest with you, this time last year myself and my dh were contemplating doing the same thing. Our ds who was in year six at the time was desperate to move up to the feeder secondary school with his friends, that just so happened to be the only CofE and outstanding school in our borough so it is highly sought after. We live in one town and the primary school ds attended and secondary we wanted him to attend are only 1.6 miles away but they just cut across the next boarder into the next town so we weren't officially in catchment.

We didn't own our own home and were renting at the time so we could have quite fairly and legally moved closer to the secondary school but it is rather an affluent area and rental costs were just too high for us so we decided to stay put and see what happened. It was the longest six months of our lives but in the end our ds got his place so we were delighted. My point is though I can sort of understand how some parents may be desperate to get their child into a particular school and are willing to go to drastic lengths, I'm not saying it's right or anything but at least these parents are bothered about their children's education (not all parents care enough) and aren't simply opting to send their children local were the schools may be dire, I certainly wouldn't accept a bad school for my child and nobody else should have to.

I know people who got a y7 into that school by having their older ds in the sixth form after the rest of his education was in a private school. Really can't see the justifications of sibling places going to kids with siblings new to the 6th form. It's not as if they'll be travelling to school together.

Part of the issue is that around honeypot schools, house price premiums mean that the cheaper housing will tend to be around the margins of the catchment [this is often exacerbated by the fact that such schools become honeypots quite simply because they are in the middle of affluent areas and thus have a 'good' intake].

Relatively well-off families trying to 'get in on the cheap' through temporary renting will therefore disproportionately disadvantage the poorer families living around the margins of the catchment - so rather than being 'an ethical crusade' against the wealthy homeowners in the heart of the catchment, it actually turns out to specifically disadvantage the poorer families towards the margins.

There will always be people willing to take the risk, however good 'detection' becomes. However, raising the cost (through e.g. having to rent a proper family home, rather than a 1-bed flat, through having to rent for a couple of years rather than 6 months, through having to actually sell your original house), as well as marginally improving detection, at least brings the cost of this kind of ruse more into line with the cost of actually resettling in catchment.

Paperm0ver

Yes, that school. [eyeroll]
I think it quite suits some schools to turn a blind eye to address shenanigans, because it skews their intake in favour of organised motivated families. I imagine this particular school may also face challenges to their criteria for music places, as it is still heavily weighted towards auditions, ie. children whose parents have organised and paid for years of lessons/youth orchestra/ensembles/instrument practice, which I gather is contrary to the admissions code insisting on testing for aptitude rather than ability.

Interesting that you know people actively opting for the other local single-sex school instead - so do we, and in fact that was the choice we made as well, and we couldn't be happier.

Marnia,

The thing is, all you need, really, is for there to be a shift in public perception from 'it's easy to do it, you just do this and it will work' to 'no, there will be checks, it's not worth it, don't bother'.

So even a not-100%-efficient, mostly automated (automatic checks against council-held information, for example) system that nevertheless catches a certain number of people can have a disproportionate effect on people's general decision making: because the costs of temporary renting are not insignificant, it tips the 'cost benefit analysis' quite a bit if the chances of not getting a school place anyway are perceived as increasing.

In 'honeypot schools' areas, I suspect that the council is also helped by a certain amount of public reporting, and as the onus of proof is then put onto applicants, not the council, workload is again reduced.