Secondary school places - tips for making the best of it

tiggytape, thank you ever so much for your very detailed message. We are on waiting list for 5 schools now. our waiting list positions are 24,64,60,29, and 97.

Should we appeal ? or wait ? what is the advantage of appeal?

Thank you so much

@tiggytape
Thank you very much for your reply. Our fist choice school takes 180 students per year.(our waiting list place is 24). My DC is the only child and we have not got any faith link.

Can you please explain when you say " Do you suspect an error"? what type of error ? only thing I can think of is how they measured the distance? do you know any website that I can check distance to school.?

( School admission criteria says -who live nearest to the school, as measured by a
straight line from the home address to the nearest school gate. All distances will be measured using
School Admission’s computerised geographical information system).

MY DC has not got any place, I applied for 5 schools , our local council (Kingston) says at this moment we are unable to offer any school place and your child is in the waiting list for all schools applied. My DC is 24th place on the waiting list of our first choice , all other 4 choices DC is more than 60th place. Our first choice is very popular school. we live just 1.5 Km away, last year cut of was 2 km, this year 1.2 Km. Do you think we have any chance of getting our first choice ? 24th is place (our first choice) . Thank you.

tiggy - thanks for that information about GCSEs. In DD's case, our allocated school does not do triple science, and she is very good at science. Also she's extremely computer literate, and we travel a lot to France but it looks like at her allocated school she can only do a language if she doesn't do computer science. Our #1 school does do the separate sciences, as well as a subject (engineering) she could very likely be interested in, and there appears to be no restriction on doing computing and a language.

We have several other fairly strong arguments too, but it's good to know we can use that one as well!

Good luck everyone.

tiggy thankyou, that's all really helpful.

The school SENDCo has already messaged me and said she's putting together a report for us to present at appeal. There aren't any other professionals involved.Partly because at the moment she doesn't need it, but also because school do it all. The Learning Mentor is incredibly skilled, we're lucky to have her.

I've spent too long tonight reading all the local admission and appeal arrangements.
I've even found a way to draw a radius on google maps of the furthest distance children have been allocated places.
It ends ON my house! Seriously!
I'm wondering if the person across from us who was the only other person from our primary to apply got in.

I also can't work out how according to the information people who put it down as 2nd, 3rd, or "Other" choice got in, then we didn't when it was our first choice. It doesn't seem fair.

Hopefully though all of that means we stand a chance of getting a place from the waiting list. The waiting list figures here aren't published until mid-April.

Ds1 goes to a school 9 miles away. He got in on appeal despite the waiting list being huge. Always worth appealing

Joining the thread to get advice.
We've been offered our 3rd choice school, which wasn't a choice really but a last resort as we can't home school.

Schools in this area aren't great anyway but the school we've been offered is 2nd worst in the borough, in the bottom 12% in the country and only 17% of the kids got the equivalent of a C in English & Maths. DD is bright, but as others have said, she wouldn't have the academic peers around her.

1st choice is a school about 3 miles away (the next closest school to us.) A school bus goes past the end of our road as kids further away but in feeder schools will go there. It does better results wise (couldn't do worst really) but more importantly it offers the emotional support DD needs.

DD is very shy, low self esteem, anxious Primary school are amazing and have had her in nurture groups every afternoon for 3 terms which has improved everything massively, but she could so easily be set back. She's still very young for her age compared with the other girls in her year. I know senior schools won't give her the support she has had at primary (most primary schools don't) but she needs something.
1st choice school has lots of awards for the support she needs and spoke lots about it generally so it's obviously a strong focus of the school.
Allocated school I know from experience are terrible! I also met a very honest and lovely teacher who just kept repeating "We offer that support for children who have educational needs" even when I explained DD would most likely be in the top sets.

Allocated school is on our estate, about a 3 minute walk away. Her "friends" are either going there, or the boys school. She's only really made friends in this last year since the school have been putting in he additional support. There will be other people she'll know at the other school and a fresh start away from kids who don't know her as the quiet, shy loner could do her the world of good.

She never stood a chance of getting into 2nd choice school (best in the area) and we didn't put any others down as she couldn't have coped with catching various buses to get there.

I'm still waiting for the letter to say how we appeal. If I read it right we automatically go on waiting lists for the other 2 schools.

At the appeal what kind of information can we provide other than telling our point of view. Do they take into account information from schools? The schools agree out allocated school wouldn't be the best place for her either.

Just to add DD is being very pragmatic about it all and is okay about the allocated school, as she knows most people from her year will be there, but she'd rather go to the 1st choice school. (I had to spend a lot of time praising the local school as I knew this could happen and all her classmates would be there. She HATED it initially!)