No choice School

If you chose a school that wasn't your nearest, you won't get free transport. However, if you named your nearest school as one of your preferences and ended up being allocated a school more than 3 miles away from home by the shortest safe walking route, your child is entitled to free transport by law.

DS is at a school just over 3 miles away. He gets a bud pass from the LEA. In reality I'm not sure the bus is much quicker than walking because it goes all around the houses, but he's at least warm and dry.

Accept the place you have been offered and then put yourself on the waiting list for all your preferred schools. You live close enough that a waiting list space may well come up. If not, if you're over 3 miles away you should have transport funded as it's not your choice to go to a far away school - it's where you have been diverted to.

There is if you wanted your nearest but didn't get a place!

I'm not sure about that as they allocated it .. it wasn't one of the OPs choices which were closer...i thought if they allocated it they did pay over 3 miles but not if you chose it and there was a closer one.

IME you won't get transport provided / paid for as local authorities only have to provide transport to the nearest closest possible school. As soon as you are at one further away, there is no obligation for them to provide any form of transport.

Calculating distance via footpaths is now obsolete, at least around here, as most (if not all) LEAs now measure in a straight line. The issue in these appeals was that the LEA had measured the safe walking route only via pavements. The parents argued that, as the footpath (which cut off a large corner of their walk to school) was lit, it was safe and so should have been included. Even the LEA agreed, as the footpath had only been excluded because of an error in the software. The LEA remeasured the distances and at least some of the children were admitted because this was (in infant class size terms) an error which had cost them a place.

The places weren’t awarded on appeal and it isn’t the panel’s role to follow up. Whether the parents used the footpath was up to them. The point at stake was that the calculation of distance should have recognised the footpath, it didn’t and so the LEA was in error.

Our LEA very rarely pays for transport because distances are generally too short for anyone to qualify.

@PanelChair Interested in your reference to measuring distances using footpaths. I wonder how many of those CYP actually used the footpath on a dark day in Winter. Did you ever follow up to see if any families had then argued it was unsafe to use the footpath so they needed free home to school transport?

There are free map tools that do a radius from two postcodes which is a decent sense check. Hopefully you'll get in on wait list

You’ve done the basic checks - sometimes errors are made where (say) the LEA overlooks that there’s a sibling already at the school.

People don’t generally do their own measurement, because LEAs generally use a computer package which measures from a data point at the school to a data point on the home and you can’t duplicate that with (say) Google maps. But it’s still important to double-check the LEA’s measurement as much as you can. Most LEAs use straight line distance but if (say) the LEA uses safe walking route to measure the distance, make sure that they haven’t overlooked footpaths (as happened in a batch of appeals I heard years ago).

The first thing you need to do is check there hasn't been a mistake. Have they put your daughter in the correct admissions category for each school? Does the home to school distance look about right?

If there has been no mistake, to win an appeal you will need to show that the disadvantage to your daughter from not attending this school outweighs any disadvantage to the school from having to cope with an additional pupil. The fact the allocated school is over 3 miles away is irrelevant for appeal. You need to show specific things that are relevant to your daughter that she will miss out on if she isn't admitted to the appeal school.

There will be lots of movement up to even the beginning of September

Where is child on waiting list ?
If a place becomes available & he's top of the list, it will be offered to him.

I'm exactly in the same situation, three good schools whiting 1 mile, and got offered one that is more than 3 miles away. My daughter was crying yesterday.

Sending love xxx

Ring the schools to find out where you are on the waiting list. Remember that there is likely to be some movement, because there will be children who have been allocated a place at a state school but who will actually go to private school. In the next couple of weeks they will be declining the state school places and people will start moving up the waiting lists. How much movement will depend a lot on your area - how many go private, how many apply for both state and private, etc.

In the meantime, you accept the offered place. You don't want to end up with nothing, and if you get in off a waiting list you can decline the original offer at that point.

@PettsWoodParadise life would be so much easier if all schools had same criteria. It's no wonder people get caught out.
We'd only get into one non faith school on distance. We'd get into faith on basis of baptism but my DC never went to church primary so wouldn't want that. We have at least 5 more within 2 miles but wouldn't get in any on distance

If I had looked at the nearest schools to me none of them are ‘bankers’, one has religious criteria, one academic (grammar), one only usually goes out 1.2 miles, another only 1.5 miles and I live closest to the academic school which requires an entrance test, the others are not traditionally available on distance, despite being 1.3 miles from one and 1.9 miles from the other . DD would have ended up at a school two bus rides away if she hadn’t sat the grammar test, now she can walk to school. It isn’t always clear and rarely your closest school that is available you, at least in my part of London!

Schooling is very postcode sensitive in some areas, before I had kids I presumed people just went to the closest but it’s not always the case and you have to look at each schools admission priorities which isn’t always only based on distance.Your council should have a web page that links to historical admissions info for all local schools including sibling allocation, geographical distance etc etc….but tbh you’d be best talking to parents in your local area to find out your best next steps. All schools will operate waiting lists and have appeals processes but popular schools generally are oversubscribed.

As others have said you need to check the admissions criteria and if any of them have an admission zone. When I applied for my eldest where we were living at the time the closest school was not our admission zone school and we would have been very unlikely to have got a place, the admission zone school was further away than the next closest school.

My middle child was an absolute disaster of an allocations year - over 100 pupils had no school place at all on the 1st March, (it was eventually resolved, but there was still movement right into September and October.)

Did you go to the open evening for the offered school? Taking out the distance issue what are your thoughts on the school? Have any of her friends been offered the same school?

Accept the place you have been offered, the worst outcome would be no school at all.

In the next few weeks schools will collate the acceptances they have received and waiting lists will be published.

Call the schools you wanted your daughter to go to and ask them to confirm your daughter will go on their waiting list.

There's a lot of movement, usually all the way into September. Don't panic.

As others have said, check that your application was processed correctly: you were placed in the correct oversubscription category, the distance from home to school was measured correctly, etc.

You can appeal for all the schools you listed. To win, you will have to show that the prejudice (detriment) to your child in not attending the school will outweigh the prejudice to the school and the pupils already in it in accepting an extra pupil. Look for features in each school which would suit your child - curriculum, extra curricular activities, pastoral care or whatever.

Do what you can to calm your child’s devastation. Unless you can gain a place in another school through an appeal or the waiting list, they may have to attend the offered school, so try to find something positive to say about it.

Even if you have applied to the closest school, there could just be a lot more children that qualified before yours.

Which means you will be even further away for the next school iyswim

As pp have said find out where you are on the waiting list. Ask the LA under which criteria and distance the last pupil was admitted. Just to check you are indeed further away than the last admission.

Are you in a very densely populated area? To not get into a school 0.7 miles away is unusual. When you get the letter check they have your address down properly, or the admission category your child is in. In a few weeks you should be able to check your waitlist place which should be very high and there is usually a lot of movement before the summer.

Accept the 3.7 mile school, apply for transport, go in the waiting lists for the others, you must be high up the wait lists given how close you are. There’s a lot of movement between now and Easter.

Did you look at criteria other than distance? Where are you located